4 o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Languages and the Antiquity of Speaking Man. In this essay he 

 maintained that the human race, when first endowed with articu- 

 late language, was necessarily of one community and one speech, 

 and that the origin of the various linguistic stocks is due to a 

 force which is in constant activity, and which may be styled " the 

 language-making instinct of very young children." Many in- 

 stances of languages thus spontaneously created by children were 

 given; and in a later paper on the Development of Language, 

 read before the Canadian Institute of Toronto, in 1888, as a sequel 

 to the address, and published in the Journal of the Institute and 

 afterward separately, further evidence was produced to show that 

 the words and grammar of such languages might, and in many 

 cases probably would, be totally different from those of the pa- 

 rental speech. In the original address the fact was pointed out 

 that in the first peopling of every country, when, from various 

 causes, families must often be scattered at wide distances from 

 one another, many cases must have occurred where two or more 

 young children of different sexes, left by the death of their parents 

 to grow up secluded from all other society, were thus compelled 

 to frame a language of their own, which would become the 

 mother-tongue of a new linguistic stock. It is evident that, along 

 with their new language, these children and their descendants 

 would have to devise a new religion, a new social policy, and in 

 general new modes of life, except in so far as reminiscences of the 

 parental example and teachings might direct or modify the work- 

 ings of their minds. All these conclusions, it is affirmed by Mr. 

 Hale, in his Introduction to the Committee's Sixth Report to the 

 British Association, " accord precisely with the results of ethno- 

 graphical investigations in America." 



He further maintained that while, according to the evidence 

 adduced by geologists, we must believe that a being who had the 

 form and some of the faculties of man (including probably some 

 partly developed power of speech) existed in the Quaternary era, 

 many thousands and perhaps many ten thousands of years ago, 

 all the evidence points to the conclusion that social man, of the 

 existing species, fully endowed with the human faculties, includ- 

 ing that of articulate speech, appeared only some seven or eight 

 thousand years back ; and, further, that when " speaking man " 

 thus appeared, his mental like his physical capacity though, of 

 course, not his knowledge was fully equal to the capacity of any 

 of his descendants. 



The solution thus offered of the linguistic problem was re- 

 ceived with more prompt and general favor than is usually 

 accorded to novel theories. Prof. Abel Hovelacque, well known 

 as one of the most eminent philologists and ethnologists of 

 Europe, and now the official director of the School of Anthro- 



