MENTAL EVOLUTION OF MAN 221 



may have heard uttered by men under the stress of 

 pain or terror. All of the various vowels are simply 

 modifications of this element by altering the shape of 

 the mouth cavity and orifice, while the consonants are 

 produced by interrupting the sound-waves with the 

 palate or lips or tongue. Like the cell as a unit of 

 structure throughout the organic world, this elemental 

 utterance proves to be the basic unit of all human 

 languages, which vary so widely among races of to-day 

 no less than they have in the history of any single 

 people. 



One of the first steps in the making of spoken words 

 was taken by human beings when they imitated the 

 calls or other sounds produced by living things, and 

 tacitly agreed to recognize the imitation as a symbol 

 of the creature making it. Thus the names for the 

 cuckoo and the crow in many languages besides our 

 own are simply copies of the calls uttered by these 

 birds; a Tahitian calls a cat mimi; the name for a 

 snake almost invariably includes the hissing attributed 

 to that creature. After a time words which were at 

 first simply imitations and which referred only to the 

 things that made these sounds came to refer to certain 

 qualities of the things imitated, so that the naming of 

 other than natural objects, such as qualities, began, 

 leading ultimately to the use of words for quahties 

 belonging to many and different objects in the way of 

 abstractions. 



Much hght upon the evolution of language is ob- 

 tained when we treat the speech of various races as 

 we did the skeletal structures of cats and seals and 

 whales. When we compare the Italian, Spanish, Por- 



