NATURE OF ROOTS AND WORDS. 511 



who would trace the origin of speech to the inarticulate cries of 

 the anthropoid ape or pithecoid man, I do not know which. Let 

 Wilhelm Bleek, cousin of the archievolutionist Haeckel, state his 

 own case. 



" The fact," he says,* " that conditions similar to those of humanity 

 can no longer develop themselves from animal speechlessness, proves 

 nothing ; just as the fact that the progress of a language like that 

 of the Hottentots to the stage of development reached by its no very 

 distant Indogermanic relatives is now impossible, proves nothing." 



But if this fact proves nothing, we may at least require that the 

 evolutionist should prove something. I do not, of course, demand 

 that he should develop language from animal cries by actual experi- 

 ment ; but I do most emphatically demand that he should prove the 

 possibility of such development, or of the capacity for such develop- 

 ment in the lower orders. 



The substance of his argument on this point is contained in a note 

 to the passage above quoted, which reads as follows : " Those classes 

 of animals that stand next to man are, if not externally at least 

 internally, in a different condition from that in which they were at 

 the period when humanity arose. Being as yet hardly, formed, they 

 were then not only more susceptible of change, but there also lay in 

 them a stronger impulse toward further progress, and the attainment 

 of a higher stage. This impulse had to be satisfied, as was done in 

 the case of human beings ; or, if it remained long without satisfac- 

 tion, it would necessarily be extinguished, and therewith ceased the 

 possibility of their freeing themselves from the condition in which 

 they were. This condition became all the while more and more 

 confirmed; and what at first was the uncex'tain advance of a forward 

 impulse toward formation, and, at the same time, the first steps 

 towards a further development of this powei', forms now the petrified, 

 stereotyped forms of a species of animals which seems to have long 

 ago been deprived of the possibility of internal change."! 



Here, in order to prove something, two groundless assumptions 

 are made to fill the gaps in the logic of facts, to supply the " missing 

 link" in the evolutionary chain, viz. : first, a miraculous impulse of 

 which no proof is given j and, secondly, an equally miraculous capa- 



* Origin of Language : American Translation, p. 46. 



t I regret exceedingly that the original was not accessible, as the carelessness of the American 

 translator has made the translation barely intelligible. 



