54 SSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



of kind or only a difference of degree between a 

 recept and a concept. With a view to this 

 discovery, then, we have five chapters which are 

 full of anecdotes bearing on the "language" of 

 animals and men. For as the term " ideation " is 

 made to cover what is not human, as well as what 

 is human, in the process of thought, and all that 

 leads up to it, so language is made to cover not 

 only speech, but all the noises and gestures which 

 in children precede speech and in brutes take the 

 place of speech. 



There is much that is extremely interesting in 

 these chapters, and much which any one may 

 verify and add to by appealing to his own ex- 

 perience. Every one has had some experience of 

 the cleverness of animals and of the quaintly 

 original efforts of children to express themselves. 

 That brutes understand one another and communi- 

 cate with one another no attentive observer of 

 their habits can doubt. In fact, they have a 

 language, and can even learn to use ours. What, 

 then, is the difference ? Here Mr. Romanes, how- 

 ever little we like his terminology, keeps clearly 

 to his point. Brutes have percepts and recepts ; 

 their language never rises above that which, in the 

 human animal, belongs to the receptual or pre- 

 conceptual phase. A human being talks like a 

 parrot at a certain stage, but a parrot never talks 

 like a human being who has grown up to his 



