REASON AND DIVERS TONGUES. 267 



Clearly we need not. Primitive man must have felt, 

 as Mr. Romanes says * the child did, " the exigencies of 

 expression;' and if so, expressed himself as best he 

 could, by combinations of bodily, facial, and oral move- 

 ments. If he meant to express anything, that, as Mr. 

 Romanes has allowed,t was the one thing necessary. A 

 sign made up of an inarticulate sound accompany- 

 ing motions of the hands and body and facial contor- 

 tions, may be as truly the expression of conceptions 

 {essentially intellectual language) as would be the utter- 

 ance of a group of articulate sounds. No doubt such 

 primitive men would have had difficulties to contend 

 with which our children have not ; but how does such 

 a circumstance even tend to show that their intel- 

 lectual nature was diffisrent from that of our own senior 

 wranglers and cabinet ministers } 



Mr. Romanes next addresses himself to the con- 

 sideration of " sentence-words," and he asks % the 

 strange question, " Can anything in the shape of spoken 

 language be more primitive than the very first words 

 which are spoken by a child, or even by a parrot ? " 

 He considers that sentence-words are more primitive 

 still, because even a parrot may learn to use words by 

 association, while primitive man could not have learned 

 them thus, but must have invented them. But what a 

 curious confusion is here ! Because one man makes a 

 machine, his action may be called less perfect and 

 more primitive than the act of another man who uses it 

 after it is made ; but the intelligence of the man who 

 acts in the latter case need be very small compared with 

 * p, 329. t p. 164. % p. 331. 



