386 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



adjective, and the verb. Not till long subsequent ages, however, 

 would this division have taken place in its fulness. During 

 the time which we are now contemplating, there could have 

 been no distinction at all between the genitive case and 

 the adjective ; neither could there have been any verbs as 

 independent parts of speech. Nevertheless, already some 

 of the denotative signs would have been used as names 

 of particular objects, others of particular qualities, and yet 

 others of particular actions, states, and relations. Not yet 

 deserving to be regarded as fully differentiated parts of 

 speech, these object-words, quality-words, &c., would have 

 resembled those with which we are all well acquainted in 

 nursery language, and which still survive, in a remarkably 

 large measure, among many dialects of a low order of develop- 

 ment. Now, as soon as these denotative names became at 

 all fixed in meaning within the limits of the same community, 

 those which respectively signified objects, qualities, actions, 

 states, and relations, must necessarily have been often used in 

 apposition ; and, as often as they were thus used, would have 

 constituted nascent or pre-conceptual propositions. 



The probability certainly is that immense intervals of 

 time would have been consumed in the passage through 

 these various grades of mental evolution ; but when we 

 remember the great importance of this kind of evolution to 

 the species which had once begun to travel in that direction, 

 we cannot wonder that survival of the fittest should have 

 placed a high premium upon the instrument of its attain- 

 ment or, in other words, that the faculty of sign-making, 

 when once happily started, should have been successively 

 pushed onwards through ascending grades of efficiency, so 

 that it should soon become as unique in the mammalian 

 series as, for analogous reasons, are the flying powers of the 

 Chiroptera. But however long or however short the time may 

 have been that was required for our early progenitors to pass 

 from one of these stages of sign-making to another, so soon 

 as the denotative name of an object was brought into 

 apposition with the denotative name of a quality or an action^ 



