33° Habit and Instinct. 



line of ancestors have never ceased to drill their brains 

 and to perfect their organs of speech. From this alone we 

 may be disposed to doubt whether acquired capabilities in 

 the true sense can ever be transmitted." Romanes,* in 

 reply to this, brought forward a general argument, drawn 

 from the complexity of language and the connection of 

 speech with man's intellectual powers, and the consequent 

 improbability that definite use of words should become 

 hereditary. He then asked whether "it is not the case 

 that the particular feature common to all languages — the 

 combination of vowel and consonant sounds which go to 

 constitute what we know as articulate syllables — as a 

 matter of fact are instinctive ? Long before a young child 

 is able to understand the meanings of any words, it begins 

 to babble articulate syllables ; and I do not know," he 

 adds, " that a more striking fact can be adduced at the 

 present stage of the Weismann controversy than is this 

 fact which he has thus himself unconsciously suggested, 

 namely, that the young of the only talking animal should 

 be alone in presenting the instinct of articulation." This 

 argument was met, in the discussion at the Newcastle 

 meeting of the British Association (1889), by the counter- 

 argument that since language has made man what he is, 

 articulation would be under the sway of natural selection. 

 Only those who possessed a congenital power of articula- 

 tion could possibly be evolved into a race of speakers. 

 Eomanes uses this as an illustration of what he terms 

 the elusiveness of Prof. Weismann's theory. First, the 

 absence of any instinctive result of the long use of speech 

 is adduced as evidence that acquired characters are not 

 transmitted; and then, when it is shown that the only 

 element in articulate speech which we could reasonably 

 expect to be transmitted is actually so transmitted, the 



* " Darwin and after Darwin," vol. ii. pp. 335-33G. 



