284 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON 



the genesis of those powers of ideation which first put 

 a soul of meaning into the" gesture signs, as much 

 as the hypothesis he objects to ignores the process of 

 putting meaning into vocal signs. Not, of course, that 

 Mr. Romanes thinks so. He fancies that he finds 

 *' even in the lower animals, the signmaking faculty in 

 no mean degree of development." But this we deny, 

 for the reasons before stated.* Animals, of course, 

 make instinctive movements, which are responded to by 

 their fellows, and so might the " Urmenschen " of these 

 German theorists ; but real signs such movements would 

 not be, unless they were meant to be signs^ and con- 

 sciously depicted something a knowledge of which they 

 were intended to convey. 



The second hypothesis of the origin of language he 

 adverts to, is the well-known one of Mr. Darwin — the 

 spontaneous vocal imitation by a monkey of some other 

 animal's voice as a sign to denote its presence. In 

 this connection Mr. Romanes says,t speaking of the 

 chimpanzee " Sally " at the Zoological Gardens, " It does 

 not seem to me difficult to imagine that such an animal 

 should extend the vocal signs which it habitually 

 employs in the expression of its emotions and the 

 logic of its recepts, to an association with gesture- 

 signs, so as to constitute sentence-words indicative of 

 such simple and often- repeated ideas as the presence 

 of danger, discovery of food, etc." There is, of course, 

 not the least difficulty in imagining this ; but, as a 

 fact, the animal does not do it, though, if it did do so, 

 .such a fact would not constitute any difficulty for 

 * See above pp. 7, 65, 128. f p. 368. 



