l^S MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN, 



Talking birds — which happen to be the only animals whose 

 vocal organs admit of uttering articulate sounds — show them- 

 selves capable of correctly using proper names, noun-sub- 

 stantives, adjectives, verbs, and appropriate phrases, although 

 they do so by association alone, or without appreciation of 

 grammatical structure. Words are to them vocal gestures, 

 as immediately expressive of the logic of recepts as any other 

 signs would be. Nevertheless, it is important to observe that 

 this faculty of vocal gesticulation is the first phase of articulate 

 speech in a growing child, is the last to disappear in the 

 descending scale of idiocy, and is exhibited by talking birds 

 in so considerable a degree that the animals even invent 

 names (whether by making distinctive sounds, as a particular 

 squeak for " nuts," or by applying words to designate objects, 

 as "half-past-two" for the name of the coachman)— such in- 

 vention often clearly having an onomatopoetic origin, though 

 likewise often wholly arbitrary. 



I will now conclude this chapter by detailing evidence to 

 show the extent to which, under favourable circumstances, 

 young children will thus likewise invent arbitrary signs, which, 

 however, for reasons already mentioned, are here almost 

 invariably of an articulate kind. It would be easy to draw 

 this evidence from sundry writers on the psychogenesis of 

 children ; but it will be sufficient to give a few quotations 

 from an able writer who has already taken the trouble to 

 collect the more remarkable instances which have been 

 recorded of the fact in question. The writer to whom I 

 allude is Mr. Horatio Hale, and the paper from which I quote 

 is published in the Proceedmgs of the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science, vol. xxxv., 1886. 



"In the year i860 two children, twin boys, were born in 

 a respectable family residing in a suburb of Boston. They 

 were in part of German descent, their mother's father having 

 come from Germany to America at the age of seventeen ; but 

 the German language, we are told, was never spoken in the 

 household The children were so closely alike that their 



