1G6 THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 



&quot;No sign talker,&quot; Mr. Romanes reminds us, &quot;with 

 any amount of time at his disposal, could translate 

 into the language of gesture a page of Kant.&quot; 1 



The next stage in the Evolution of Language must 

 have been reached as naturally as the Language of 

 gesture and tone. From the gesture-language to 

 mixtures of signs and sounds, and finally to the 

 specialization of sound into words, is a necessary 

 transition. Apart from the fact that gestures and 

 tones have limits, circumstances must often have 

 arisen in the life of early Man when gesture was im 

 possible. A sign Language is of no use when one 

 savage is at one end of a wood and his wife at the 

 other. He must now roar ; and to make his roar ex 

 plicit, he must have a vocabulary of roars, and of all 

 shades of roars. In the darkness of night also, his 

 signs are useless, and he must now whisper and have 

 a vocabulary of whispers. Nor is it difficult to con 

 ceive where he got his first brief list of words. 

 Instead of drawing things in the air with his finger, 

 he would now try to imitate their sounds. Every 

 thing around him that conveyed any impression of 

 sound would have associated with it some self-ex 

 pressive word, which all familiar with the original 

 sound could instantly recognize. Imagine, for in 

 stance, a herd of buffalo browsing in a glade of the 

 African forest. The vanguard, some little distance 

 from its neighbors, hears the low growl of a lion. 

 That growl, of course, is Language, and the buffalo 

 understands it as well as we do when the word &quot;lion&quot; 

 is pronounced. Between the word &quot; lion &quot; spoken, 

 and the object lion growled, there is no difference in 

 1 Mental Evolution, p. 147. 



