V 



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POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



AUGUST, 1893, 

 STUDIES OF ANIMAL SPEECH. 



BY PROF. E. P. EVANS. 



rpHE enthusiasm with which Mr. Garner has devoted himself 

 JL to the study of simian speech, and the general interest ex- 

 cited by his discoveries, naturally suggest a comparison of his in- 

 vestigations with those of his predecessors in this department of 

 linguistic research. Perhaps the most serious and scientific at- 

 tempt of this kind was made nearly a century ago by Gottfried 

 Immanuel Wenzel, who published at Vienna, in 1808, a volume of 

 216 pages entitled Neue auf Yernunft und Erfahrung gegrun- 

 dete Entdeckungen iiber die Sprache der Thiere (New Discoveries 

 concerning the Language of Animals, based on Reason and Ex- 

 perience), in which he maintained that the lower animals are ca- 

 pable of expressing their thoughts and emotions by means of ar- 

 ticulate sounds, and that these utterances are not only intelligible 

 to their kind, but may also be understood by man, indicated by 

 alphabetical signs, and thus reduced to writing. He made a list 

 of the sounds uttered by thirty different birds and beasts, and pre- 

 pared a dictionary of more than twenty pages, to which he added 

 a number of translations from animal into human speech. These 

 so-called translations are very free, and give merely a paraphras- 

 tic statement of what he supposes to be the significance of certain 

 canine and feline tones, the versions being confined to his inter- 

 pretations of the colloquies of cats and dogs. As an illustration 

 of his proficiency in this language and the practical value of such 

 knowledge, he relates an incident, which sounds as though it 

 might belong to the ancient and fabulous literature known to the 

 Germans as Jcigerlatein, or hunters' Latin. He once went to 

 visit a friend, who was a great huntsman, but on learning that he 



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