THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. 329 



forcing of one part of speech into the office of another, which 

 so frequently occurs at this age, is due to anything more than 

 the exigencies of expression where as yet there are scarcely 

 any words for the conveyance of meaning of any kind. There- 

 fore, on grounds of psychological analysis alone, I do not see 

 that we are justified in arguing from these facts that a young 

 child has no appreciation of the difference between the 

 functions of the different parts of speech — any more than 

 we should were we to argue that a grown man has no such 

 appreciation when he extends the meaning of a substantive 

 (such as "pocket") so as to embrace the function of an 

 adjective on the one hand {e.g. " pocket-book "), and of a verb 

 on the other {e.g. "he caiuioned off the white, and pocketed 

 the red "). What may be termed this grammatical abuse of 

 words becomes an absolute necessity where the vocabulary is 

 small, as we well know when trying to express ourselves in a 

 foreign language with which we are but slightly acquainted. 

 And, of course, the smaller the vocabulary, the greater is such 

 necessity ; so that it is greatest of all when an infant is only 

 just emerging from its infancy. Therefore, as just remarked, 

 on grounds of psychological analysis alone, I do not think we 

 should be justified in concluding that the first-speaking child 

 has no appreciation of what we understand by parts of 

 speech ; and it is on account of the uncertainty which here 

 obtains as between necessity and incapacity, that I reserved 

 my consideration of " sentence-words " for the independent 

 light which has been thrown upon them by the science of 

 comparative philology. 



Now, when investigated by this light, it appears, as already 

 observed, that the protoplasmic condition of language prior to 

 its differentiation into parts of speech was of much longer 

 duration in the race than, relatively speaking, it is in the 

 individual. Moreover, it appears to have been of relatively 

 much greater importance to the subsequent development of 

 language. How, then, is this difference to be explained } 

 I think the explanation is sufficiently simple. An infant of 

 to-day is born into the medium of already-spoken language ; 



