376 ORGANIC GROWTH sec. 



The postulate from which Schleicher derives these con- 

 clusions is the belief : " That the activity, the function of an 

 organ is, so to speak, only one of the qualities of the organ 

 itself, although it is not always possible to the scalpel and 

 the microscope of the investigator to exhibit the material 

 causes of that quality." As with gait, so it is with speech. 

 Speech is the symptom, perceived by the ear, of a complex of 

 material relations in the structure of the brain and vocal 

 organs, with their nerves, bones, muscles, etc. Lorenz 

 Drefenbach had already expressed the same ideas : " The 

 material basis of language and its varieties has not yet been 

 anatomically demonstrated, but to my knowledge a compara- 

 tive investigation of the vocal organs of people speaking 

 different languages has never yet been undertaken. It is 

 possible, even probable, that such an investigation would lead 

 to no satisfactory results ; nevertheless, this would by no 

 means be enough to destroy the conviction of the existence of 

 material conditions of language in the structure of the body. 

 For who would deny the existence of such conditions, although 

 they are still concealed from direct perception, and possibly 

 can never be made the object of direct observation ? " The 

 results of infinitesimal quantities and relations are, he con- 

 tinues, in some cases wonderfully striking ; as, for example, in 

 the phenomena of the spectrum, of colour and smell in 

 plants, and so on. As light is to the sun, so is sound to 

 speech ; as in the former the character of the light is evidence 

 of a material condition, so in the latter the character of the 

 sound. 



With these arguments of the philologist I fully agree, and 

 here repeat the proposition which forms the subject of the whole 

 of the present section, and emijraces that of the preceding : 

 That functional activity — exercise — universally precedes and 

 determines the higher evolution of organs. The larynx of our 

 ancestors was at first quite incapable of j^roducing language 



