THE INTERPRETER 1 35 



members together in ever enlarging groups, whose 

 mutual dependence led to their permanence, and to 

 the survival of the strongest. 



To these purely natural factors is to be added the 

 enormous part played by the evolution of articulate 

 speech. " Much water has flowed under the bridges " 

 since David Hartley, a pioneer-anthropologist of the 

 eighteenth century, of whom Huxley had high appre- 

 ciation, expressed the opinion that, owing to the 

 shortness of the time which has elapsed since the 

 Flood, both language and writing must have been 

 given by direct miraculous agency. 1 Small blame to 

 the philosophers of that time ; but not to those who, 

 in our own, would place the faculty of speech among 

 the supernatural endowments of man. For modern 

 physiology has not only demonstrated that the cortex, 

 or layer of grey cellular substance, which covers the 

 cerebrum, is the organ of the mind ; it has localised 

 the psychic centres to which the several sensory 

 nerves telegraph their reports from the outer world, 

 and it has also determined the place of the motor 

 centre of articulate speech. In discussing the struc- 

 tural changes in the brain which have made possible 

 the associated movement required for that " priceless 

 gift," Professor D. J. Cunningham, in the address 



1 Hartley, Prop, lxxxiii., quoted by Leslie Stephen, History of 

 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i. p. 193. 



