328 PLEASANT WA YS IN SCIENCE. 



abode in the trees were, like the gibbons, unapt when alone 

 both in attack and in defence. One can imagine how the 

 use of vocal signals of various kinds would be of service to 

 the members of these troops, not only in their excursions, 

 but during the work of erecting huts or defences against 

 their enemies. If in two generations the silent wild dog 

 acquires, when brought into the company of domestic dogs, 

 no less than five distinct barking signals, we can well believe 

 that a race much superior in intelligence, and forced by 

 necessity to associate in large bodies, would in many 

 hundreds of generations, perhaps acquire a great number 

 of vocal symbols. These at first would express various 

 emotions, as of affection, fear, anxiety, sympathy, and so 

 forth. Other signals would be used to indicate the approach 

 of enemies, or as battle-cries. I can see no reason why 

 gradually the use of particular vocal signs to indicate various 

 objects, animate or inanimate, and various actions, should 

 not follow after a while. And though the possession and 

 use of many, even of many hundreds, of such signs would be 

 very far from even the most imperfect of the languages now 

 employed by savage races, one can perceive the possibility 

 which is all that at present we can expect to recognize that 

 out of such systems of vocal signalling a form of language 

 might arise, which, undergoing slow and gradual develop- 

 ment, should, in the course of many generations, approach 

 in character the language of the lowest savage races. That 

 from such a beginning language should attain its higher and 

 highest developments is not more wonderful in kind, though 

 much more wonderful, perhaps, in degree, than that from 

 the first imperfect methods of printing should have arisen 

 the highest known developments of the typographic art. 

 The real difficulty lies in conceiving how mere vocal signal- 

 ling became developed into what can properly be regarded 

 as spoken language. 



Of the difficulties related to the origin of, or rather the 

 development of, man's moral consciousness, space will not 

 permit me to speak, even though there were much to be said 



