THE DAWN OF MIND. 147 



with social advance alike as cause and consequence ; 

 that the primitive man could not evolve these higher 

 intellectual faculties in the absence of a fit environ- 

 ment ; and that in this, as in other respects, his prog- 

 ress was retarded by the absence of capacities which 

 only progress could bring." l 



The last testimony is that of Language. It has 

 already been pleaded in excuse for the absence of 

 actual proof for mental evolution that Mind leaves no 

 material footprints by which the palaeontologist can 

 trace its upward path. Yet this is not wholly true. 

 The flints and arrow-heads, the celts and hammers, of 

 early Man are fossil intelligence ; the remains of 

 primitive arts and industries are petrified Mind. But 

 there is one mould into which Mind has run more 

 large and beautiful than any of these. When its con- 

 tents are examined they carry us back not only to 

 what men worked at with their hands, but to what 

 they said to one another as they worked and what 

 they thought as they spoke. That mould is Lan- 

 guage. Language, says Jean Paul, is " ein Worter- 

 buch erblasster Metaphern " a dictionary of faded 

 metaphors. But it is much more. A word is a 

 counter of the brain, a tangible expression of a mental 

 state, an heirloom of the wealth of culture of a race. 

 And an old word, like an ancient coin, speaks to us of 

 a former currency of thought, and by its image and 

 superscription reveals the mental life and aspiration of 

 those who minted it. " Language is the amber in 

 which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have 

 been safely embalmed and preserved. It is the em- 

 bodiment, the incarnation, of the feelings and thoughts 



1 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Svcioloyy, Vol. i., p. 90, 1. 



