MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 55 



manhood. So in language we must not draw the 

 line, if any one does, at sign-making language, but 

 only that kind of sign-making which we understand 

 by speech. And " till the age of self-consciousness 

 dawns " the child has not properly speech, but 

 merely the power of expressing "receptual judg- 

 ments." Its self-consciousness, before it is capable 

 of "conceptual ideation," is "rudimentary or 

 nascent." Of the gradual attainment of self-con- 

 sciousness Mr. Romanes says 



" I say 'gradual' because the process is throughout of the 

 nature of a growth. Nevertheless, there is some reason to 

 think that when this growth has attained a certain point, it 

 makes, so to speak, a sudden leap of progress which may 

 be taken to bear the same relation to the development of the 

 mind as the act of birth does to that of the body. In neither 

 case is the development anything like completed. Midway 

 between the slowly evolving phases in utero and the slowly 

 evolving phases of after-growth, there is in the case of the 

 human body a great and sudden change at the moment when 

 it first becomes separated from that of its parent. And 

 so there is some reason to believe it is in the case of the 

 human mind. Midway between the gradual evolution of 

 receptual ideation and the no less gradual evolution of con- 

 ceptual, there appears to be a critical moment when the soul 

 first becomes detached from the nutrient body of its parent 

 perceptions, and wakes up in the new world of a consciously 

 individual existence." 



Time and space forbid our attempting to follow 

 Mr. Romanes in his interesting appeal to philology 

 on the phylogenic question as he has appealed to 

 language on the ontogenic. And there is the less 



