REASON AND DIVERS TONGUES. 265 



while still literally an infant, the use of grammatical 

 forms is being constantly borne in upon its mind ; and, 

 therefore, it is not at all surprising that, when it first 

 begins to use articulate signs, it should already be 

 in possession of some amount of knowledge of their 

 distinctive meanings as names of objects, qualities, 

 actions, states, or relations. Indeed, it is only as such 

 that the infant has acquired its knowledge of these 

 signs at all ; and hence, if there is any wonder in the 

 matter, it is that the first-speaking child should exhibit 

 so much vagueness as it does in the matter of gram- 

 matical distinction. 



" But how vastly different must have been the case 

 of primitive man ! The infant, as a child of to-day, 

 finds a grammar already made to its use, and one which 

 it is bound to learn with the first learning of denotative 

 names. But the infant, as an adult in primeval time, 

 was under the necessity of slowly elaborating his 

 grammar together with his denotative names ; and 

 this, as we have previously seen, he only could do by 

 the aid of gesture and grimace. Therefore, while the 

 acquisition of names and forms of speech by infantile 

 man must have been thus in chief part dependent on 

 gesture and grimace, the acquisition by the infantile 

 child is now not only independent of gesture and 

 grimace, but actively inimical to both. The already- 

 constructed grammar of speech is the evolutionary 

 substitute of gesture, from which it originally arose ; 

 and, hence, so soon as a child of to-day begins to 

 speak, gesture-signs begin at once to be starved out 

 by grammatical forms. But in the history of the race 



