i62 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



quite accept what Mr. Romanes says,* that such speech 

 may attain an astonishing degree of fulness and effi- 

 ciency, and that though such words have sometimes 

 an onomatopoetic origin, they, as a rule, have not such ; 

 that they are far from being always monosyllabic ; that 

 they are sufficiently numerous and varied to constitute 

 a not inefficient language without inflections, and that 

 its syntax has an affinity to that of gesture-language. 



The eighth chapter is devoted to a consideration of 

 the relation borne by tone and gesture to words. We 

 have but little to object to its contents. No reasonable 

 person could, or would wish to dispute the great superi- 

 ority of speech over gesture-language, as a medium for 

 the communication of thought. Obviously thought can 

 thus be much more easily and rapidly expressed ; it can 

 be used in the dark, and while the hands are otherwise 

 occupied. Nevertheless, Mr. Romanes very properly 

 observes t that he is speaking of gesture-language as 

 we actually find it. What the latent capabilities of such 

 language may be is another question. He adds later 

 bn,i " 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. . . . This, how- 

 ever, 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 essentially ideographic character of such signs, I 



* P- 144- t P- 147. 



% p. 148. See also above, p. 141 ; and see, below, the case of 

 Martha Obrecht. 



