330 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



and long before it is itself able to imitate the words which it 

 hears, it is well able to understand a large number of them. 

 Consequently, while still literally an hifant, the use of gram- 

 matical forms is being constantly borne in upon its mind ; 

 and, therefore, it is not at all surprising that, when it first 

 begins to use articulate signs, it should already be in posses- 

 sion of some amount of knowledge of their distinctive mean- 

 ings as names of objects, qualities, actions, states, or relations. 

 Indeed, it is only as such that the infant has acquired its know- 

 ledge of these signs at all ; and hence, if there is any wonder 

 in the matter, it is that the first-speaking child should exhibit 

 so much vagueness as it does in the matter of grammatical 

 distinction. 



But how vastly different must have been the case of 

 primitive man ! The infant, as a child of to-day, finds a 

 grammar already made to its use, and one which it is bound 

 to learn with the first learning of denotative names. But 

 the infant, as an adult in primeval time, was under the 

 necessity of slowly elaborating his grammar together with 

 his denotative names ; and this, as we have previously seen, 

 he only could do by the aid of gesture and grimace. 

 Therefore, while the acquisition of names and forms of 

 speech by infantile man must have been thus in chief part 

 dependent on gesture and grimace, the acquisition by the 

 infantile child is now not only independent of gesture and 

 grimace, but actively inimical to both. The already- 

 constructed grammar of speech is the evolutionary substitute 

 of gesture, from which it originally arose ; and, hence, so 

 soon as a child of to-day begins to speak, gesture-signs 

 begin at once to be starved out by grammatical forms. But 

 in the history of the race gesture-signs were the nursing- 

 mothers of grammatical forms ; and the more that their 

 progeny grew, the greater must have been the variety of 

 functions which the parents were called upon to perform. 

 In other words, during the infancy of our race the growth 

 of articulate language must not only have depended, but 

 also re-acted upon that of gesture-signs — increasing their 



