ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 301 
animals a language for communicating sensations, desires, 
and thoughts, partly a language of gestures, partly a 
language of feeling or touch, partly a language of cries 
or sounds, but a real language of words or ideas, a so-called 
“articulate” language, which by abstraction changes sounds 
into words, and words into sentences, belongs, as far as we 
know, exclusively to Man. 
The origin of human language must, more than anything 
else, have had an ennobling and transforming influence 
upon the mental life of Man, and consequently upon his 
brain. The higher differentiation and perfecting of the 
brain and mental life as its highest function developed in 
direct correlation with its expression by means of speech. 
Hence, the highest authorities in comparative philology 
justly see in the development of human speech the most 
important process which distinguishes Man from his animal 
ancestors. This has been especially set forth by August 
Schleicher, in his treatise “On the Importance of Speech 
for the Natural History of Man.” * In this relation we see 
one of the closest connections between comparative zoology 
and comparative philology; and here the theory of develop- 
ment assigns to the latter the task of following the origin 
of language step by step. This task, as interesting as it is 
important, has of late years been successfully undertaken by 
many inquirers, but more especially by Wilhelm Bleek, who 
has been occupied for seventeen years in South Africa with 
the study of the languages of the lowest races of men, and 
hence has been enabled to solve the question. August 
Schleicher more especially discusses, in accordance with the 
theory of selection, how the various forms of speech, like 
all other organic forms and functions, have developed by 
