266 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON 



gesture-signs were the nursing-mothers of grammatical 

 forms ; and the more that their progeny grew, the 

 greater must have been the variety of functions which 

 the parents were called upon to perform. In other 

 words, during the infancy of our race the growth of 

 articulate language must not only have depended, but 

 also reacted upon that of gesture-signs — increasing their 

 number, their intricacy, and their refinement, up to 

 the time when grammatical forms were sufficiently 

 far evolved to admit of the gesture-signs becoming 

 gradually dispensed with. Then, of course, Saturn-like, 

 gesticulation was devoured by its own offspring ; * the 

 relations between signs appealing to the eye and to the 

 ear became gradually reversed ; and, as is now the case 

 with every growing child, the language of formal utter- 

 ance sapped the life of its more informal progenitor." 



We have thought it better to cite this passage 

 entire, that Mr. Romanes's position and argument may 

 be thoroughly well understood by our readers. 



Now, we will put entirely on one side, for argument's 

 sake, any notion of man having been created at once in 

 the plenitude of his intellect, and bodily and mental 

 activity. We will assume him to have had an origin, 

 different indeed in kind from that of any other animal, 

 but yet not such as to have placed him in a better posi- 

 tion than the lowest we could assign to a mature rational 

 being at all. Under such circumstances, need we 

 assign to the earliest form of language the conditions 

 which Mr. Romanes assign to it } 



* It had hitherto been our impression that Saturn devoured his 

 children himself, not that he was devoured by them. 



