340 



MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN 



able to the gesture-language." Next, to quote again only 

 one of the numerous examples previously given to show 

 the primitive order of apposition, whereby the language of 

 gesture serves to convey a predication, '' I should be punished 

 if I were lazy and naughty" would be put, "I lazy, naughty, 

 no!— lazy, naughty, I punished; yes!" Again, "to make is 

 too abstract for the deaf-mute ; to show that the tailor makes 

 the coat, or that the carpenter makes the table, he would 

 represent the tailor sewing the coat and the carpenter sawing 

 and planing the table. Such a proposition as ' Rain makes 

 the land fruitful ' would not come into his way of thinking : 

 'Rain, fall; plants, grow,' would be his pictorial {i.e. 

 receptual) expression." Elsewhere this writer remarks that 

 the absence of any distinction between substantive, adjective, 

 and verb, which is universal in gesture-language, is customary 

 in Chinese, and not unknown even in English. "To butter 

 bread, to cudgel a man, to oil machinery, to pepper a dish, and 

 scores of such expressions, involve action and instrument in 

 one word, and that word a substantive treated as the root or 

 crude form of a verb. Such expressions are concretisms, 

 picture-words, gesture-words, as much as the deaf-and-dumb 

 man's one sign for 'butter' and 'buttering.'" And similarly 

 as to the substantive-adjective, in such words as iron-stone, 

 feather-grass, chesnut-horse, &c. ; here the mere apposition of 

 the words constitutes the one an attribution of the other, as is 

 the case in gesture-language. And not only in Chinese, but 

 as shown in the last chapter, in a great number and variety 

 of savage tongues this mode of construction is habitual. In 

 all these cases distinctions between parts of speech can be 

 rendered only by syntax ; and this syntax is the syntax 

 of gesture. 



I will ask the reader to refer to the whole passage in 

 which I previously treated of the syntax of gesture,* giving 

 special attention to the points just noted, and also to the 

 following -.—invariable absence of the copula, and frequent 

 absence of the verb (as " Apple-father-I " = " My father gave 



• Chapter VI., pp. 1 14-120. 



