yOCAL LANGUAGE OF LAURA BRIDGEMAN. 119 



In Laura Bridgeman then, we recognize a being possessed of lively 

 intelligence, delicate mental perceptions, and acute moral and sympa- 

 thetic feelings ; capable of all organic utterances, but excluded by 

 absolutely impassible barriers from any perception of spoken language. 

 She cannot even conceive of sound as a thing heard ; yet she aims 

 at expressing ideas by its means, and derives pleasure from her own 

 vocal utterances. If language be primarily a divine gift, or instinctive 

 faculty, in which the organs of speech respond to conceptions of the 

 mind, as other organs act in obedience to mental volition, her's seems 

 to be a case where some of the assumed phonetic types or roots of lan- 

 guage ought to be traceable. The interjectional element of language 

 is clearly recognisable ; while that of onomatopoeia is precluded. Laura 

 Bridgeman, as we see, possesses not only the rational soul, but mental 

 faculties of a high order. But shutout from the external world, from 

 whence knowledge is transmitted to us through eye and ear ; and de- 

 void of all means of communicating with other minds, her whole men- 

 tal faculties lay inert, like one in a state of syncope. She uttered 

 sounds, unquestionably associated in her mind with ideas ; and craved 

 in all ways to open up some avenue of intercourse with other minds. 

 But all was darkness, silence, isolation, till she attained to an inter- 

 change of thought and experience with her fellow-beings. Neverthe- 

 less the mind was there ; the means of manifesting its activities was 

 alone wanting ; and that supplied, the force of William Humboldt's 

 remark forthwith appears: — "There could be no invention of language 

 unless its type already existed in the human understanding. Man is 

 man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech, he must 

 be already man." 



The modern idea of man's origin by developement from an inferior 

 unintelligent order of animated beings, presupposes an animal devoid 

 of speech ; and as intellect dawns, on its first stage of developement 

 into the reflecting being, its originally limited powers of utterance 

 gradually extend their compass, and language would thus be ths slow 

 product of eifort, practice, and culture. On such a theory the detached 

 elements of a vocabulary would be the first product; and the scientific 

 relations of grammatical forms of language would pertain only to 

 its latest stages, and in their most perfected condition to written lan- 

 guages. But, on the contrary, grammatical forms are now recognised 

 as among the early and most enduring characteristics of a language ; 

 resisting changes which revolutionize its vocabulary. The infer- 



