224 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



and abundant. Large fruits and edible nuts on 

 low and pendant boughs may be said in Milton's 

 phrase to * hang amiable.' Need we wonder that in 

 such a mild and fruitful region, a great number of 

 separate tribes were found speaking languages 

 which careful investigation has classed in nineteen 

 distinct linguistic stocks?"^ Even more striking is 

 the case of Oregon on the Californian border, 

 which is also a favoured and luxuriant land. " The 

 number of linguistic stocks in this narrow district 

 is more than twice as large as in the whole of 

 Europe." ^ 



* Dr. Hale. Cf. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Matt, p. 260. 



2 The construction of the mouth and lips has of course 

 had something to do with differences in Languages, and 

 even with the possibility of language in the case of Man. 

 You must have your trumpet before you can get the sound of 

 a trumpet. One reason why many animals have no speech 

 is simply that they have not the mechanism which by any 

 possibility could produce it. They might have a Language, 

 but nothing at all like human Language. It is one of the 

 significant notes in Evolution that Man, almost alone among 

 vertebrates, has a material body so far developed as to make 

 it an available instrument for speech. There was almost cer- 

 tainly a time when this was to him a physical impossibility. 



" The acquisition of articulate speech," says Prof. Macalister, 

 "became possible to man only when the alveolar arch and 

 palatine area became shortened and widened, and when his 

 tongue, by its accommodation to the modified mouth, became 

 shorter and more horizontally flattened, and the higher refine- 

 ments of pronunciation depend for their production upon the 



