278 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL VI. 
deal with the beginning of things shrouded in impenetrable mystery in 
an easy way. If man alone of all animal creation possesses the godlike 
attitude, and a hand which distinguishes him as a superior being, may 
we not mark his vocal organs and the faculty of speech as not only 
characteristic of his superiority, but as the nearest of earthborn to his 
Maker? He carries about in his garment of flesh, intellectual and spirit- 
ual nature, evidences of his divine origin, and the faculty of speech is not 
the weakest argument that he is a son of God. His vocal organs 
and intellect will enable him to learn any language. The faculty of 
speech is the work of God. As he made man capable of seeing 
and hearing, he gave to him the faculty of speaking. Each living 
being was created with its special organs of voice and utterance, 
and these have been perpetuated with other specialities of its peculiar 
organization. 
The social state of man required language as a means of communica- 
tion, simple in structure for early man, and not a highly perfected lan- 
guage. Several theories have been propounded as to its origin as the 
imitation of sounds, the utterance of exclamations in moments of emo- 
tion resolved into elements of language, and the spontaneous expression 
of each distinct conception of the mind. Was language fully matured 
bestowed upon man in a miraculous manner, or was there given to him 
by God the power of perfecting language from simple elements? The 
analysis of languages reveals the fact that they pass through stages of 
development, that a linguistic system cannot be manufactured and that 
in general they can be resolved into roots in their earliest stages. There 
is no necessity for accepting language as an attribute of man, a ready- 
made gift of God, nor ascribing it to human origin. There lie as its 
foundation, roots, which form the secondary stage, succeeding the stage 
of naming objects, as they suggested something to the mind peculiar to 
themselves. These roots as meaningless words seem to have arisen from 
the first class of words, and became useful for joining words together, or 
they may have existed in the human mind as phonetic types implanted 
by God himself. By the joining of meaningless words, and of the mean- 
ing and meaningless together in their various stages according to un- 
written laws, by the intelligent will of man influenced by his environ- 
ment, we arrive at language in its true grammatical form, and language 
becomes a human art. We find in it the results of human intelligence 
and will, with God creating reason in man and laws of language. The 
first man began the work of making language by naming each one of 
the animals among whom he lived. He did not possess a ready-made 
grammar and dictionary, and even the names were not given to him, but 
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