58 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



far removed from a primitive stage, and hence the 

 origin of language must go back far earlier than 

 the Egyptian. We can find no race of man just 

 learning to speak ; for every savage tribe has a lan- 

 guage, even though in some cases the language is 

 simple, crude, and partly dependent upon gesture. 

 Our only conception of the origin of language must, 

 therefore, be obtained by inference. By tracing lan- 

 guage backward we may be able to see the direction 

 in which it seems to be tending, and from this gain 

 a fairly accurate conception of its still earlier stages. 

 Now every bit of evidence from all sources tells 

 the same story. As languages are traced backward 

 the tendency is always toward simplification, by loss 

 of differentiation, by loss of words, and by the use 

 of words with a broader and less definite meaning. 

 This tendency is so evident and so universal that 

 philologists, quite independently of any conception 

 of any special theories of evolution, have concluded 

 that it points clearly toward a time when language 

 did not exist at all, and when therefore the human 

 beings were obliged to create, slowly and painfully, 

 a method of communication by speech. It may not 

 be unprofitable to note a few of the steps that have 

 been suggested as leading to the invention of lan- 

 guage. The start must have been in the crude gen- 

 eral ideas which represent life experiences of all 

 higher animals, and which man must have had with 

 the rest; such experiences as eating, running, etc. 

 The first step must have been in applying some 

 recognizable sound to these ideas. Mr. Garner be- 

 lieves that monkeys do this to a slight extent 

 although his observations are not generally credited 

 by naturalists. How the first sounds came to be 



