64 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



taken up. And so he goes on using the words he 

 learns, one at a time, at first singly and later in com- 

 bination with each other. This is the simplest and 

 straightest road toward speech, and it is hardly con- 

 ceivable that the child should take any other route. 

 But this makes it all the more probable that the be- 

 ginning of language in the early history of man vas 

 something as outlined above. Primitive man too, as 

 well as the child, would inevitably have taken the 

 simplest plan to make himself understood. If his 

 mind was developing in those early days as the mind 

 of the child certainly develops, it is inevitable that 

 the simplest means of communication of ideas would 

 be followed at first. Intonations, sentence words, 

 followed later by a differentiation of words, and 

 finally of sentences, would be the natural course to 

 primitive man as well as the child — a fact that tells 

 us almost surely that the outline given by philology 

 for the beginning of language must express the es- 

 sential facts. 



The Development of Languages 

 Whether there was more than one beginning of 

 language in human history we have no means of 

 knowing. This seems to be a part of the other ques- 

 tion whether the human race had several origins or 

 only one, a question for which science has as yet no 

 answer. If the race of speaking animals were only 

 one at the start, it must surely have separated early 

 into groups which have since kept isolated from each 

 other; and this isolation must have taken place be- 

 fore language had become well developed enough to 

 have any definite form, for the languages of different 

 great groups not only differ totally in words, but 



