166 THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 



*' No sign talker," Mr. Romanes reminds us, " with 

 any amount of time at his disposal, 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 im- 

 possible. 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 ex- 

 plicit, 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 con- 

 ceive 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. Every- 

 thing around him that conveyed any impression of 

 sound would have associated with it some self-ex- 

 pressive word, which all familiar with the original 

 sound could instantly recognize. Imagine, for in- 

 stance, a herd of bufi'alo browsing in a glade of the 

 African forest. The vanguard, some little distance 

 from its neighbors, hears the low growl of a lion. 

 That growl, of course, is Language, and the buffalo 

 understands it as well as we do when the word "lion" 

 is pronounced. Between the w^ord " lion " spoken, 

 and the object lion growled, there is no difference in 

 ^ Mental Evolution^ p. 147. 



