328 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



5. The same results may be put in a slightly different 

 way by saying that language among animals, so far as is 

 known, and among children at the word-reflex stage, does 

 not assert facts, but is either exclamatory or hortatory. 

 With children, the word which is at first an exclamation 

 or a call becomes converted into a word-sentence during, 

 we may perhaps say, the latter half of the second year. 

 Preyer recognised the first spoken judgment in the case of 

 his child in the twenty-third month. The judgment 

 referred to the milk which the child was drinking, and 

 consisted of the word Heiss ! That this was a judgment 

 meaning " The milk is too hot/' rather than an excla- 

 mation, could of course only be determined by the 

 circumstances and manner of the child. But the circum- 

 stances are often such as to leave no doubt upon the 

 matter. Thus, I have seen a little girl come down stairs, 

 display a new dress, and say, " Nannie," by way of con- 

 veying that Nannie (nurse) had put it on. But a decided 

 advance in articulation, mental as well as verbal, is shown 

 when two or more words are for the first time put together. 1 

 Preyer 2 found the first significant combination during the 

 twenty-fourth month, in the command or wish, ct Haim, 

 mimi," which is nursery-German for " I would like to go 

 home and drink milk." A month later, the same child 



world, it will probably be among apes. Their chatter is said to contain 

 more distinct sounds than that of any other animals, if we except the 

 artificial case of birds trained to talk ; but, apart from the question of in- 

 telligence, it may be doubted if they have sufficient nicety of perception 

 to found a language. Indeed, Mr. George Jennison writes me : "In 

 four years' work with chimpanzees we could never notice any sounds not 

 marking distinct emotions, pleasure, pain, anger. Almost any chim- 

 panzee will respond to the * pleasure ' cry." 



As to the social Hymenoptera, Lubbock's experiments (Ants, Bees and 

 Wasps, pp. 275-8, and 311, 312) are unfavourable to communication 

 among Bees and Wasps, while with regard to Ants, they appear to in- 

 dicate the kind of communication we have described as sensori-motor 

 (see p. 164). The further experiments described (pp. 172-177) do not 

 really seem to modify this result. Bethe (Ameisen, pp. 51-54) throws 

 doubt even on Lubbock's somewhat modest inferences, and attributes 

 all the apparent communication of ants to a marvellous co-ordination of 

 smells with motor impulses. But Bethe is defending a thesis. 



1 I mean, of course, words that already have a separate use. An 

 independent-minded little girl of my acquaintance used the phrase Pitda 

 (put me down) almost before any other, but this was of course a mere 

 imitation of the total sound, not a combination made by the child 

 herself. - Op. cit. p. 151. 



