CHAPTER V. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 



IF Evolution is the method of Creation, the faculty 

 of Speech was no sudden gift. Man's mind is not to 

 be thought of as the cylinder of a phonograph to 

 which ready-made words were spoken and stored up 

 for future use. Before Homo sapiens was evolved he 

 must necessarily have been preceded for a longer or 

 shorter period by Homo alalus, the not-speaking man ; 

 and this man had to make his words, and beginning 

 with dumb signs and inarticulate cries to build up 

 a body of Language word by word as the body was 

 built up cell by cell. 



The alternative theory of the origin of Language 

 universally held until lately, and expressed in so 

 many words even by the eighth edition of the 

 Encyclopaedia Britannica, that " our first parents 

 received it by immediate inspiration," has the same 

 relation to exact science as the view that the world 

 was made in six days by direct creative fiat. Both are 

 poetically true. But to science, seeking for precise 

 methods of operation, neither is an adequate statement 

 of now ascertained facts. The same processes of re- 

 search that made the poetic view of creation unten- 

 able in the physical realm are now slowly beginning 



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