THE TRAXSITION IiV THE RACE. ^67 



made so prodigious an advance in the faculty of sign- 

 making. In this greater rehance on the sense of sight, 

 therefore, we probably have another among the many and 

 complex conditions which determined the difference in respect 

 of sign-making between the remote progenitors of man and 

 their nearest zoological allies — a difference which would 

 naturally become more and more pronounced the more 

 that vision and gesticulation acted and reacted on one 

 another. 



It appears to me that this suggestion of Geiger admits of 

 being strikingly supported by certain facts which are known 

 to obtain in the case of deaf-mutes. Even when wholly 

 uneducated, the born mute, as we have previously seen, 

 habitually invents articulate sounds as his own names of 

 things. These sounds are, of course, unheard by the mute 

 himself, and their use must be ascribed — as I have already 

 ascribed it — to the hereditary transmission of an acquired 

 propensity. But the point now is that, although the majority 

 of these articulate sounds appear to be wholly arbitrary {e.g. 

 ga for " one," scJuippatter for " two," riecke for " I will not "), a 

 certain proportion are often clearly traceable to vocalizations 

 incidental to movements of the mouth in performing the 

 actions signified {e.g. imimni for "eating," scJiipp for "drink- 

 ing").* Similarly, observation of a dog's mouth, while in the 

 act of barking, leads to an imitative action on the part of a 

 mute as his sign for a dog, and this in turn may lead to the 

 utterance of such an articulate sound as be-yer, which the mute 

 afterwards uses as his name for a dog.f Now, if words may 

 thus be coined even by deaf-mutes as a result of observing 

 movements of the mouth, much more is this likely to have 

 been the case among the " Urmenschen," who were able not 

 only to sec the movements, but also to hear the sounds. 



I will now adduce the two hypotheses above alluded 

 to as conceivable suggestions touching the mode of transi- 



* For cases, see Heinieke, Beobachtungen iibcr Stummc, s. 137, &c. 

 t Ibid., s. 73. 



