EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 229 



doubt it was an addition of great importance, for, in com- 

 parison with it, the other natural modes of communicating 

 ideas are insignificant. Still, the main and fundamental 

 phenomenon, language, as the communication of ideas, was 

 no new gift of the Creator to man; and in speech itself, 

 when we judge of it as a natural fact, we see only a result of 

 some of those superior endowments of which so many others 

 have fallen to our lot through the medium of a superior 

 organization. 



The first and most obvious natural endowment concerned 

 in speech is that peculiar organization of the larynx, trachea, 

 and mouth, which enables us to produce the various sounds 

 required. Man started at first with this organization ready 

 for use, a constitution of the atmosphere adapted for the 

 sounds which that organization was calculated to produce, 

 and, lastly, but not leastly, a mental power prompting to, and 

 giving directions for, the expression of ideas. Such an 

 arrangement of mutually adapted things was as likely to 

 produce sounds as an Eolian harp placed in a draught is to 

 give forth tones. It was unavoidable that human beings so 

 organized, and in such a relation to external nature, should 

 utter sounds, and also come to attach to these conventional 

 meanings, thus forming the elements of spoken language. 

 The great difficulty which has been felt, is to account for man 

 going in this respect beyond the inferior animals. There 

 could have been no such difficulty, if speculators in this class 

 of subjects had looked into physiology for an account of the 

 superior vocal organization of man, and had they obtained a 

 true science of mind to show man possessing a faculty for the 

 expression of ideas which is only rudimental in the lower 

 animals. Another difficulty has been in the consideration 

 that, if men were at first utterly untutored and barbarous, 

 they could scarcely be in a condition to form or employ 

 language an instrument which it requires the fullest powers 

 of thought to analyze and speculate upon. This difficulty 

 comes strangely from those who can see none in the miraculous 

 imparting of a full vocabulary to beings as yet possessing but 

 a portion of the ideas which an entire language represents. 



