176 THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 



In such ways as these we may conceive of early 

 Man building up the fabric of speech. In time his 

 vocabulary would enlarge and become, so far as ob- 

 jects in the immediate environment were concerned, 

 fairly complete. As Man gained more knowledge of 

 the things around him, as he came into larger relations 

 with his fellows, as life became more rich and com- 

 plex, this accumulation of words would go on, each 

 art as it was introduced creating new terms, each 

 science pouring in contributions to the fund, until the 

 materials of human speech became more and more 

 complete. This process was never finished. The 

 evolution of Language is still going on. No corrobo- 

 ration of the theory of the evolution of Language could 

 be more perfect than the simple fact that it has gone 

 on steadily down to the present hour and is going on 

 now. Tens of thousands of words — no longer now 

 onomatopoetic — have been evolved since Johnson corn- 

 Man, almost alone among vertebrates, has a material body so far 

 developed as to make it an available instrument for speech. 

 There was almost certainly a time when this was to him a physi- 

 cal impossibility. 



"The acquisition of articulate speech," says Prof. Macalaster, 

 ' ' became possible to man only when the alveolar arch and pala- 

 tine area became shortened and widened, and when his tongue, 

 by its accommodation to the modified mouth, became shorter 

 and more horizontally flattened, and the higher refinements of 

 pronunciation depend for their production upon the more exten- 

 sive modifications in the same direction." Even for differences 

 in dialect, as the same writer points out, there is a physical basis. 

 " With the macrodont alveolar arch and the corresponding modi- 

 fied tongue, sibilation is a difficult feat to accomplish, and hence 

 the sibilant sounds are practically unknown in all the Austra- 

 lian dialects." — British Association : Anthropological Section. 

 Edinb., 1891. 



