60 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



mented by gestures they became more useful and 

 constituted a great advance over the language of the 

 highest animals below man. But how different from 

 the developed language of later generations! But 

 we must remember that the life of these men was on 

 a very narrow plane ; their needs and interests were 

 slight and their sentence words and gestures were 

 sufficient to make possible the beginning of that 

 social life which, as we shall see, was the secret of 

 the elevation of the human race into civilization. 

 With increasing social needs came the need of more 

 definite speech, and by contact with each other, by 

 testing and trial, a differentiation of the wide mean- 

 ing, pregnant, early words took place, slowly enough 

 at first we may be sure. Words were joined to- 

 gether in such a way that the closeness of the words 

 showed connection in thought. Verbs and subjects 

 came to be used and the sentence evolved. But mean- 

 time man had learned to combine two or more words 

 together into one with a new meaning, and such com- 

 binations enriched his vocabulary. As he acquired 

 more words he felt more and more the need of them ; 

 for his life became richer and he had greater desire to 

 impart his e^^periences and thought to others. Old 

 words were brought into new relations, and the orig- 

 inal words presently lost their early meaning and 

 became the roots out of which language was built. 

 Sentences took the place of sentence words ; adverbs 

 and pronouns replaced gestures, and, with the early 

 words capable of being molded and modified, lan- 

 guage was well started in its evolution. Of course it 

 was still a long distance from a possibility of a 

 written form, and much less of a literature. The 

 unknown length of time preceding the earliest 



