148 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



experience has shown this to be the material best adapted to 

 this special use. The advantages of the voice are numerous 

 and obvious. There is first its economy, as employing a 

 mechanism that is available for little else, and leaving free 

 for other purposes those indispensable instruments, the hands. 

 Then there is its superior perceptibleness ; its nice differences 

 impress themselves upon the sense at a distance at which 

 visible motions become indistinct ; they are not hidden by 

 intervening objects ; they allow the eyes of the listeners as 

 well as the hands of the speaker to be employed in other 

 useful work ; they are as plain in the dark as in the light ; 

 and they are able to catch and command the attention of one 

 who is not to be reached in any other way." * 



To these advantages we may add that words, in being as 

 we have seen less essentially ideographic than gestures, must 

 always have been more available for purposes of abstract ex- 

 pression. We must remember how greatly gesture-language, 

 as it now appears in its most elaborate form, is indebted 

 to the psychologically constructing influence of spoken 

 language ; and, thus viewed, it is a significant fact that even 

 now gesture language is not able to convey ideas of any high 

 degree of abstraction. Still, I doubt not it would be possible 

 to construct a wholly conventional system of gestures which 

 should answer to, or correspond with, all the abstract words 

 and inflections of a spoken language ; and that then the one 

 sign-system might replace the other — just as the sign-system 

 of writing is able similarly to replace that of speech. This, 

 however, is a widely different thing from supposing that such 

 a perfect system of gesture-signs could have grown by a 

 process of natural development ; and, looking to the essen- 

 tially ideographic character of such signs, I greatly question 

 whether, even under circumstances of the strongest necessity 

 (such as would have arisen if man, or his progenitors, had 

 been unable to articulate), the language of gesture could have 

 been developed into anything approaching a substitute for 

 the language of words. 



* Encyclop. Brit , 9th ed., art. Thilology. 



