THE ROOT OF PRIMITrV'E LANGUAGE. 149 



of naming^ and by consequence language. For all lan- 

 guage consists, at the beginning, of symbols which are as 

 like to the things symbolized as it is practicable to make 

 them. The language of signs is a means of conveying ideas 

 by mimicking the actions or pecuharities of the things re- 

 ferred to. Verbal language is also, at the beginning, a 

 mode of suggesting objects or acts by imitating the sounds 

 which the objects make, or with which the acts are accom- 

 panied. Originally these two languages were used simul- 

 taneously. It needs but to w^atch the gesticulations with 

 which the savage accompanies his speech — to see a Bush- 

 man or a Kaffir dramatizing before an audience his mode 

 of catching game — or to note the extreme paucity of 

 words in all primitive vocabularies ; to infer that at first,' 

 attitudes, gestures, and sounds, were all combined to pro- 

 duce as good a likeness as possible, of the things, animals, 

 persons, or events described ; and that as the sounds came 

 to be understood by themselves the gestures fell into dis- 

 use : leaving traces, however, in the manners of the more 

 excitable civilized races. But be this as it may, it suffices 

 simply to observe, how many of the words current among 

 barbarous peoples are like the sounds appertaining to the 

 things signified ; how many of our own oldest and simplest 

 words have the same peculiarity ; how children tend to in- 

 vent imitative words ; and how the sign-language sponta- 

 neously formed by deaf mutes is invariably based upon 

 imitative actions — to at once see that the notion of likeness 

 is that from w^hich the nomenclature of objects takes its 

 rise. 



Were there space we might go on to point out how this 

 law of life is traceable, not only in the origin but in the de- 

 velopment of language ; how in primitive tongues the plu- 

 ral is made by a duplication of the singular, which is a 

 multiplication of the word to make it like the multiplicity 

 of the things ; how the use of metaphor — that prolific 



