I06 " MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



taught, and learns them through the medium of signs which 

 are not expressly taught Long after familiarity with speech, 

 it consults the gestures and facial expressions of its parents 

 and nurses, as if seeking thus to translate or explain their 

 words. These facts are important in reference to the biologic 

 law that the order of development of the individual is the 

 same as that of the species. . . . The insane understand and 

 obey gestures when they have no knowledge whatever of 

 words. It is also found that semi-idiotic children who cannot 

 be taught more than the merest rudiments of speech can 

 receive a considerable amount of information through signs, 

 and can express themselves by them. Sufferers from aphasia 

 continue to use appropriate gestures. A stammerer, too, 

 works his arms and features as if determined to get his 

 thoughts out, in a manner not only suggestive of the physical 

 struggle, but of the use of gestures as a hereditary expedient." 



Words, then, in so far as they are not intentionally imi- 

 tative of other sounds, and so approximate to gestures, are 

 essentially more conventional than are tones immediately 

 expressive of emotions, or bodily actions which appeal to the 

 eye, and which, in so far as they are intentionally significant, 

 are made, as far as possible, intentionally pictorial. Therefore, 

 either to make or to understand these more conventional 

 signs requires a higher order of mental evolution ; and on this 

 account it is that we everywhere find the language of tone 

 and gesture preceding that of articulate speech, as at once 

 the more simple, more natural, and therefore more primitive 

 means of conveying receptual ideas. 



We find the same general truth exemplified in the fact 

 that the language of tone and gesture is always resorted to 

 by men who do not understand each others' articulate speech ; 

 and although among the races in which gesture-language has 

 been carried to its highest degree of elaboration most of the 

 signs employed have become more or less conventional, in the 

 main they are still pictorial. This is directly proved, without 

 the need of special analysis, by the fact that the members of 

 such races are able to communicate with one another in a 



