THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE, 181 



mented ovum in embryology. Such clusters appear 

 at an early stage in the history of all developments. 

 The processes which precede this stage are of the 

 utmost subtlety, but in embryology they have yielded 

 to the latter analysis of the microscope. So it may be 

 one day with the natural history of Language. We 

 may never, for obvious reasons, get back to the actual 

 beginning, but we may get nearer. When the em- 

 bryologist reached his cluster of cells in the segmented 

 ovum, he did not believe he had found the dawn of 

 life. What further the philologist may find remains 

 a mystery. Where these 121 words came from may 

 never be known. But the development from that 

 point sufficiently shows that words, like everything 

 else, have followed the universal law, and that Lan- 

 guages, starting from small beginnings, have grown 

 in volume, intricacy, and richness, as time rolled on. 

 "All philologists," says Romanes, "will now agree 

 with Geiger — ' Language diminishes the further we 

 look back, in such a way that we cannot forbear con- 

 cluding it must once have had no existence at all.' " 



The history of progress for a long time henceforth 

 is the history of the progress of Language and the 

 increase in intelligence which necessarily went along 

 with it. From being able to say what he knew, Man 

 went on to write what he knew. The Evolution of 

 writing went through the same general stages as the 

 Evolution of Speech. First there was the onomato- 

 poetic writing — as it were, the growl-writing — the ideo- 

 graph, the imitation of an actual object. This is the 

 form we find fossil in the Egyptian hieroglyphic. For 

 a man a man was drawn, for a camel a camel, for a 

 hut a hut. Then intonation was added — accents, that 



