212 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



could translate into the language of gesture a 

 page of Kant." ^ 



The next stage in the Evolution of Language 

 must have been reached as naturally as the Language 

 of gesture and tone. From the gesture-language 

 to mixtures of signs and sounds, and finally to the 

 specialization of sound into words, is a necessary 

 transition. Apart from the fact that gestures and 

 tones have limits, circumstances must often have 

 arisen in the life of early Man when gesture was 

 impossible. A sign Language is of no use when 

 one savage is at one end of a wood and his wife at 

 the other. He must now roar ; and to make his 

 roar explicit, he must have a vocabulary of roars, 

 and of all shades of roars. In the darkness of night 

 also, his signs are useless, and he must now whisper 

 and have a vocabulary of whispers. Nor is it 

 difficult to conceive where he got his first brief 

 list of words. Instead of drawing things in the 

 air with his finger, he would now try to imitate 

 their sounds. Everything around him that conveyed 

 any impression of sound would have associated with 

 it some self-expressive word, which all familiar withj 

 the original sound could instantly recognize. Im- 

 agine, for instance, a herd of buffalo browsing in a| 

 glade of the African forest. The vanguard, somei 

 * Mental Evolution^ p. 147. 



