364 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



has in view must have been of no small importance ; for this 

 would naturally help to nourish its semiotic nature. And 

 the reason why the similar germ of sign-making which occurs 

 in the brute creation has not been similarly nurtured, I have 

 already considered in Chapter VIII. For, it is needless to 

 add, on every ground I disagree with the above quotations 

 where they represent articulate sounds as having been 

 aboriginally uttered by " Urmenschen " in the way of 

 instinctive cries, without any vestige of semiotic intention.* 



I will now pass on to consider the two other hypotheses ; 

 and by way of introduction to both we must remember that 

 our materials of study on the side of the apes is very limited. 

 I do not mean only that no single representative of any of 

 the anthropoid apes has ever been made the object of even 

 so much observation with respect to its intelligence as I 

 bestowed upon a cebus. Yet this, no doubt, is an important 

 point, because we know that of all quadrumana — and, there- 

 fore, of all existing animals — the anthropoid apes are the 

 most intelligent, and, therefore, if specially trained would 

 probably display greater aptitude in the matter of sign- 

 making than is to be met with in any other kind of brute. 

 But I do not press this point. What I now refer to is the 

 fact that the existing species of anthropoid apes are very few 

 in number, and appear to be all on the high-road to 

 extinction. Moreover, it is certain that none of these 

 existing species can have been the progenitor of man ; and, 

 lastly, it is equally certain that the extinct species (or genus) 

 which did give origin to man must have differed in several 



* Some of the supporters of the interjectional theory in this extreme, not to 

 say extravagant form, appear to go on the assumption that primitive and hitherto 

 speechless man already differed from the lower animals in presenting conceptual 

 thought. This assumption would, of course, explain why man alone began to 

 invest his instinctive cries, &c., with the character of names. But, from a 

 psychological point of view, any such assumption is obviously a putting of the 

 cart before the horse. I make this remark in order to add that the objection 

 would not apply if the ideation were supposed to be pre-conceptual — i.e. beyond 

 the level reached by any brute, though not yet distinctively human. Later on, 

 I myself espouse a theory to this effect. 



