THE DA WN OF MIND 187 



The last testimony is that of Language. It has 

 already been pleaded in excuse for the absence of 

 actual proof for mental evolution that Mind leaves 

 no material footprints by which the palaeontologist 

 can trace its upward path. Yet this is not wholly 

 true. The flints and arrow-heads, the celts and 

 hammers, of early Man are fossil intelligence ; the 

 remains of primitive arts and industries are petri- 

 fied Mind. But there is one mould into which 

 Mind has run more large and beautiful than any of 

 these. When its contents are examined they carry 

 us back not only to what men worked at with their 

 hands, but to what they said to one another as 

 they worked and what they thought as they spoke. 

 That mould is Language. Language, says Jean 

 Paul, is "ein Worterbuch erblasster Metaphern" — 

 a dictionary of faded metaphors. But it is much 

 more. A word is a counter of the brain, a 

 tangible expression of a mental state, an heir- 

 loom of the wealth of culture of a race. And 

 an old word, like an ancient coin, speaks to us 

 of a former currency of thought, and by its image 

 and superscription reveals the mental life and 

 aspiration of those who minted it. " Language is 

 the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle 

 thoughts have been safely embalmed and pre- 

 served. It is the embodiment, the incarnation, of 



