TRAI4SACTI0NS OF SECTION H. 



887 



chanf,'ing in the mouths of its speakers ; nay, the individual can even forget the 

 language of his childhood and acquire another which has not the remotest connec- 

 tion vrith it. A man cannot rid himself of the characteristics of race, but his 

 language is like his clothing which he can strip off and change almost at wiU. 



It seems to me that this is a fact of which only one explanation is possible. The 

 distinctions of race must be older than the distinctions of language. On the monu- 

 ments of Egypt, more than four thousand years ago, the Libyans are represented 

 with the same fair European complexion as that of the modern Kabyles, and the 

 painted tomb of Rekh-ma-ra, a Theban prince who lived in the sixteenth century 

 before our era, portrays the black-skinned negro, the olive-coloured Syrian, and 

 the red-skinned Egyptian with all the physical peculiarities that distinguish their 

 descendants to-day. The Egyptian language has ceased to be spoken even in its 

 latest Coptic form, but the wooden figure of the ' Sheilih-el-beled ' in the Bulaq 

 Museum, carved 6,000 years ago, reproduces the features of many a /e//ff A m the 

 modern villages of the Nile. Within the limits of history racial characteristics 

 have undergone no change. , . . ^. . 



I see therefore, no escape from the conclusion that the chief distinctions ot race 

 were established Ion? before man acquired language. If the statement made by 

 M. de Mortillet is true, that the absence of the mental tubercle, or bony excrescence 

 in which the tongue is inserted, in a skull of the Neanderthal type found at La 

 Naulette, indicates an absence of the faculty of speech, one race at least of palaeo- 

 lithic man would have existed in Europe before it had as yet invented an articulate 

 language. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that man has known how to speak for any 

 very great length of time. On the one hand, it is true, languages may remain fixed 

 and almost stationary for a long series of generations. Of this the Semitic languages 

 afford a conspicuous example. Not only the very words, but even the very forms of 

 oi-ammar are still used by the Bedouin of Central Arabia that were employed by 

 the Semitic Babylonians on their monuments five thousand years ago. At that 

 early date the Semitic family of speech already existed with all its pecuharities, 

 which have survived with but little alteration up to the present day. xVnd when 

 it is remembered that Old Egyptian, which comes before us as a literary and decay- 

 ing language a thousand years earlier, was probably a sister of the parent Semitic 

 ■speechj'the period to which we must assign the formation and development of the 

 latter cannot fall much short of ten thousand years before the Christian era. But 

 on the other hand there is no language which does not bear upon its face the marks 

 of its ori"-in. We can still trace through the thin disguise of subsequent modifica- 

 tions and" growth the elements, both lexical and grammatical, out of which language 

 must have arisen. The Bushman dialects still preserve the inarticulate clicks which 

 preceded articulate sounds in expressing ideas ; behind the roots which the philo- , 

 legist discovers in allied groups of words lie, plainly visible, the imitations of natural 

 sounds, or the instmctive utterances of human emotion ; while the grammar of lan- 

 guages like Eskiraaux or the Aztec of Mexico can-ies us back to the first mechanism 

 for conveying the meaning of one speaker to another. The beginnings of articulate 

 language are" still too transparent to allow us to refer them to a very remote era. 

 I once calculated that from thirty to forty thousand years is the utmost limit that 

 we can allow to man as a speaking animal. In fact, the evidence that he is a 

 drawing animal, derived from the pictured bones and horns of the palaeolithic age, 

 mounts"back to a much earlier epoch than the evidence that he is a speaking animal. 



Mr. Horatio Hale has lately started a very ingenious theory to account, not 

 indeed for the origin of language in general, but for the origin of that vast number 

 of apparently unallied families of speech which have existed in the world. He has 

 come across examples of children who have invented and used languages of their own, 

 refusing at the same time to speak the language they heard around them. As the 

 children belonged to civilised communities the languages they invented did not spread 

 beyond themselves, and after a time were forgotten by their own inventors. In an 

 uncivilised community, however, it is quite conceivable that such a language might 

 continue to be used by the children after they had begun to grow up and be com- 

 municated by them to their descendants. In this case a wholly new language would 

 be started, which would have no affinities with any other, and after splitting into 



