THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 1C7 



the effect. Suppose, next, the buffalo wished to con- 

 vey to its comrades the knowledge that a lion was 

 near, a lion and not some other animal, it might 

 imitate this growl. It is not likely that it would do 

 so ; some other sign expressing alarm in general 

 would probably be used, for the discrimination of the 

 different sources of danger is probably an achieve- 

 ment beyond this animal's power. But if Primitive 

 Man was placed under the same circumstances, grant- 

 ing that he had begun in a feeble way to exercise 

 mind, he would almost certainly come in time to 

 denote a lion by an imitated growl, a wolf by an 

 imitated whine, and so on. The sighing of the wind, 

 the flowing of the stream, the beat of the surf, the 

 note of the bird, the chirp of the grasshopper, the hiss 

 of the snake, would each be used to express these 

 things. And gradually a Language would be built up 

 which included all the things in the environment with 

 which sound was either directly, indirectly, or acci- 

 dentally associated. 



That this method of word-making is natural is seen 

 in the facility with which it is still used by children ; 

 and from the early age at which they begin to employ 

 it, the sound Language is clearly one of the very first 

 forms of speech. All a child's words are of course 

 gathered through the sense of hearing, but if it can 

 itself pick up a word direct from the object, it will use 

 it long before it elects to repeat the conventional 

 name taught it by its nurse. The child who says moo 

 for cow, or bow-wow for dog, or tick-tick for watch, or 

 puff-puff for train, is an authority on the origin of 

 human speech. Its father, when he talks of the hum 

 of machinery or the boom of the cannon, when he calls 



