304 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN, 



* You do not,* according to the context and the gestures of 

 the speaker. Here by degrees, with the growth of conscious- 

 ness and the analysis of thought, the external gesture is 

 replaced by some portion of the uttered sounds which agrees 

 in a number of different instances, and in this way the words 

 by which the relations of grammar are expressed came into 

 being. A similar process has been at work in producing 

 those analogical terminations whereby our Indo-European 

 languages adapt a word to express a new grammatical relation." 

 Therefore, not unduly to multiply quotations, we may 

 take it as the now established doctrine of philology that, as 

 even this more sceptical authority puts it, "Grammar has 

 grown out of gesture and gesticulation."* Later on I will 

 show in how interesting a manner early forms of articulate 

 utterance follow in their structure the language of gesture 

 already treated of in a previous chapter. It was for the sake 

 of displaying this resemblance that I there occupied so much 

 space with the syntax of gesture-language ; and, therefore, it 

 will now be my object to trace the family likeness between 

 the constructions of primitive modes of utterance, and those of 

 the parent gestures from which these constructions have been 

 directly inherited. But in order to do this more completely, 

 we must first consider the philology of predicative words. 



The parts of speech which are primarily concerned in 

 predication, and which, therefore, may be called par excellence 

 predicative words, are substantives, adjectives, and verbs. 

 I will, therefore, begin by briefly stating what is known 

 touching the evolution of these parts of speech. 



We have abundant evidence to show that originally there 

 was no distinction between substantives and adjectives, or 

 object-words and quality-words. Nor is this at all surprising 

 when we remember that even in fully developed forms of 

 speech one and the same word may stand as a substantive or 

 an adjective according to its context. " Cannon " in " cannon- 



• Introduction^ dfc, ii. 301. Or, as Wundt puts it, " Die demonstrative Wurzel 

 ist daher eine demonstrirende Pantomime in einen Laut iibersetzt" {^Vorlesungen, 

 C-fc, ii. 392). 



