232 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



are most numerous in those most favoured regions — 

 California and Brazil — where life might be most easily 

 maintained by children thus circumstanced. We note 

 this view without adopting it, but without any wish 

 to contend against it. The facts * that " neglected 

 children in some of the Canadian and Indian villages, 

 and in South Africa, who are left alone for days, can 

 and do invent for themselves a sort of lingua franca, 

 partially or wholly unintelligible to all except them- 

 selves," and that " deaf-mutes have an instinctive power 

 to develop for themselves a language of signs " (as we 

 have before seen), well accords with the fact that man 

 has ever an innate faculty for the external expression 

 of internal conceptions. 



In his thirteenth chaper, on roots of language, he 

 quotes the one hundred and twenty-one given by Prof 

 Max Muller from Sanskrit. As to these he says,t 

 *' Scarcely any of them present us with evidence of 

 reflective thought, as distinguished from the naming 

 of objects of sense-perception." But they are, as he 

 allows,^ " concepts," always expressive of abstract or 

 general ideas. 



In a note§ he justly stigmatizes as "absurd" 

 Prof Max Mliller's doctrine that "the formation of 

 thought is the first and natural purpose of language, 

 while its communication is accidental only." He very 

 properly adds, " Such a * purpose ' would imply 

 'thought' as already formed." This may be quoted 

 against Mr. Romanes himself, where he represents !| that 



* p. 263. t p. 273- X P- 269. 



§ p. 274. II p. 83. 



