REASON AND DIVERS TONGUES. 237 



immeasurably remote from that of any speechless pro- 

 genitor of homo sapiens ; and in the enormous interval 

 (whatever it may have been) many successive generations 

 of words must certainly have flourished and died." Why 

 so ? we may ask. The assertion that such time must 

 have been " immeasurably remote " is a purely gratuitous 

 assertion ; as also is the affirmation that many genera- 

 tions of words " must certainly have flourished and died." 

 Supposing that speechless men did exist before speaking 

 ones, there is nothing to show they might not have 

 performed all the actions referred to in the list, and if 

 articulate speech began afterwards, then the 121 roots 

 might have easily been evolved in the " immeasurable " 

 period of (we should say) some twelve months at the 

 most ! 



He incidentally mentions * that Archdeacon Farrar 

 ' " has observed that the whole conversational vocabulary 

 of certain English labourers does not exceed a hundred 

 words," and adds, " Probably further observation would 

 have shown that the great majority of these were em- 

 ployed without conceptual significance. Therefore, if 

 these labourers had had to coin their own words, it is 

 probable that, without exception, their language would 

 have been destitute of any terms betokening more than 

 a pre-conceptual order of ideation. Nevertheless, these 

 men must have been capable, in however undeveloped 

 a degree, of truly conceptual ideation : and this proves 

 how unsafe it would be to argue from the absence of 

 distinctively conceptual terms to the poverty of con- 

 ceptual faculty among any people whose root-words 



* p. 280. 



