THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY, 331 



number, their intricacy, and their refinement, up to the 

 time when grammatical forms were sufficiently far evolved 

 to admit of the gesture-signs becoming gradually dispensed 

 with. Then, of course, Saturn-like, gesticulation was devoured 

 by its own offspring ; the relations between signs appealing tc 

 the eye and to the ear became gradually reversed ; and, 

 as is now the case with every growing child, the language 

 of formal utterance sapped the life of its more informal pro- 

 genitor. 



We are now in a position to consider the exact psy- 

 chological relation of sentence-words to denotative and recep- 

 tually connotative words. It will be remembered that I have 

 everywhere spoken of sentence-words as representing an even 

 more primitive order of ideation than denotative words, and, 

 a fortiori, than receptually connotative words. On the other 

 hand, in earlier parts of this treatise I showed that both the 

 last-mentioned kinds of words occur in children when they 

 first begin to speak, and may even be traced so low down in 

 the psychological scale as the talking birds. This apparent 

 ambiguity, therefore, now requires to be cleared up. Can 

 anything, it may be reasonably asked, in the shape of spoken 

 language be more primitive than the very first words which 

 are spoken by a child, or even by a parrot? But, if not, 

 how can I agree with those philologists who conclude that 

 there is an even still more primitive stage of conceptual 

 evolution to be recognized in sentence-words } 



Briefly, my answer to these questions is that in the 

 young child and the talking bird denotative-words, conno- 

 tative-words, and sentence-words are all equally primitive ; 

 or, if there is any priority to be assigned, that it must be 

 assigned to the first-named. But the reason of this, I hold 

 to be, is, that the child and the bird are both living in an 

 already-developed medium of spoken language, and, there- 

 fore, as recently stated, have only to learn their deno- 

 tative names by special association, while primitive man 

 had himself to fashion his names out of the previously 

 inarticulate materials of his own psychology. Now this, 



