THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 169 



the extraordinary confusion of terms he is guilty of in trying to put 

 the study of language upon the foremost pedestal in the Temple of 

 the Natural Sciences. He distinctly' in the eai-lier part of hi.s paper 

 draws attention to the common habit which confuses the art of speech 

 with that of the factdty and yet in the same breath uses the two 

 terms interchangeably. We are altogether at a loss to see, unless this 

 is so, why one who speaks at one moment of speech as an art — a 

 thing to be acquired — can at the next ciiU it an organism, and this 

 is even more striking when we remember that Mons. Havelocque 

 claims to be treating language exclusively from the scientific point 

 of view. That the faculty of speech is in close i-elation with a 

 certain convolution of the brain no one will dispute I suppose ; nay 

 we will go farther and say with him that this same faculty is 

 hereditarily transmitted and goes down with the structure, nature 

 and qualities of the brain, but by what pi-ocess of reasoning I am 

 to arrive at the conclusion that the art of speech, a man made thing, 

 is an organism I am at a loss to conceive. One might as well say 

 that the conventional signs of our methods of recording knowledge, 

 or that the art of painting or sculpture are organisms, all are equally 

 the products of human effort, preseverance and labor. Language is 

 to put it briefly and clearly, simply and purely an instrument for the 

 conveyance of thought, the use of which depends entirely on the 

 skill of him who handles it, in exactly the same manner as the pencil, 

 brush and chisel depend upon the skill of their several users. This 

 seems to me to be so demonstral)ly obvious and the error and con- 

 fusion of terms Mons. Havelocque has fallen in to be so pla'.n that 

 it is not worth while to spend more time over it, but go on at once 

 and examine his second argument which because it contains a partial 

 truth may seem for the moment slightly more convincing. Here he 

 says that his reason for including the study of language among the 

 Natural Sciences lies in the fact that no man or group of men is 

 competent arbitrarily to change its structui*e, etc. Here we perceive 

 in a bi-ief glance that the fallacy of his second argument lies in the 

 peculiar and unscientific notion, which he in common with his school 

 holds, concerning the origin of language. Though he does not say 

 so in so m ny words it is abundantly clear from his argument that 

 he pre-supposes man to have started on his career fully equipped 

 with a i*eady-made and to a certain extent perfect medium for the 



