GESTURE ONCE COPIOUS BEYOND WORDS. 9 



amount, the verdant circling carpet, and the kind and height of the trees 

 could have been made known by pantomime in the days of the mammoth, 

 if articulate speech had not then been established, precisely as Indians or 

 deaf-mutes would now communicate the news by the same agency or by 

 signs possessing a natural analogy. 



Independent of most of the above considerations, but from their own 

 failures and discordancies, linguistic scholars have recently decided that 

 both the "bow-wow" and the "ding-dong'' theories are unsatisfactory; 

 that the search for imitative, onomatopoetic, and directly expressive sounds 

 to explain the origin of human speech has been too exclusive, and that many 

 primordial roots of language have been founded in the involuntary sounds 

 accompanying certain actions. As, however, the action was the essential, 

 and the consequent or concomitant sound the accident, it would be expected 

 that a representation or feigned reproduction of the action would have been 

 used to express the idea before the sound associated with that action could 

 have been separated from it. The visual onomatopoeia of gestures, which 

 even yet have been subjected to but slight artificial corruption, would 

 therefore serve as a key to the audible. It is also contended that in the 

 pristine days, when the sounds of the only words yet formed had close con- 

 nection with objects and the ideas directly derived from them, signs were 

 as much more copious for communication than speech as the sight embraces 

 more and more distinct characteristics of objects than does the sense of 

 hearing. 



The preponderance of authority is that man, when in the possession of 

 all his faculties, did not choose between voice and gesture, both being orig- 

 inally instinctive, as they both are now, and never, with those faculties, was 

 in a state where the one was used to the absolute exclusion of the other. 

 With the voice he at first imitated the few sounds of nature, while with ges- 

 ture he exhibited actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, 

 and distances, and their derivatives. It would appear from this unequal di- 

 vision of capacity that oral speech remained rudimentary long after ges- 

 ture had become an art. With the concession of all purely imitative sounds 

 and of the spontaneous action of the vocal organs under excitement, it is 

 still true that the connection between ideas and words generally depended 



