THE EVOL UTION OF LANG UA GE. 1 G3 



finger, and put the finger in her mouth, how she was 

 tempted to take more, how her mother found her out 

 by the spot of treacle on her pinafore, and so forth." 1 



A second witness is savage Man. Some of the 

 more primitive races, far as they have evolved past 

 the alalus stage, still cling to the gesture-language 

 which bulked so largely in the intercourse of their 

 ancestors. No one who has witnessed a conversa- 

 tion — one says " witnessed," for it is more seeing 

 than hearing — between two different tribes of Indians 

 can have any doubt of the working efficiency of this 

 method of speech. After ten minutes of almost pure 

 pantomime each will have told the other everything 

 that it is needful to say. Indians of different tribes, 

 Indeed, are able to communicate most perfectly on all 

 ordinary subjects with no more use of the voice than 

 that required for the emission of a few different kinds 

 of grunts. The fact that stranger tribes make so 

 large a use of gesture in expressing themselves to 

 one another does not, of course, imply that each has 

 not a word-language of its own. But few of the Lan- 

 guages of primitive peoples are complete without the 

 additions which gesture offers. There are gaps in the 

 vocabulary of almost all savage tribes due to the fact 

 that in actual speech the lacunae are bridged by signs, 

 and many of their words belong more to the category 

 of signs than to that of words. 



The final witness is the first attempt at Language of 

 a little child. Universally an infant opens communi- 

 cation with the mental world around it in the primi- 

 tive language of gesture and tone. Long before it has 

 learned to speak, without the use of a single word it 

 1 Tylor, Anthropology. 



