526 NATURE OF ROOTS AND WORDS. 



could not name a tree ... or any object , . . witHout 

 discovering first some general quality that seemed at the time most 

 characteristic of the object to be named." To this we answer 

 that such abstraction is totally incompatible, not only with the intel- 

 lectual capacity of primitive man, but with intelligibility, which was 

 postulated as an attribute essential to constitute language a means of 

 communication between man and man. " We have only to state the 

 proposition," says Professor Sayce,* very truly, " to see how absurd 

 it is. . . . There is no common bond of intelligibility between 

 such universal ideas. . . , These abstract ideas miist either be 

 the last result of I'eflection, the universals arrived at after a long 

 course of education, or else must be of the vaguest and most unmean- 

 ing character. In the first case, we are ascribing to the barbarian 

 the mind of the civilized man ; in the second case, any language at 

 all would be out of the question. Two persons could not talk together 

 in vague generalities, more especially when their conversation would 

 be mostly confined to the bare necessities of life." 



Man, to be intelligible to his fellow-man, must have named objects, 

 not from a general, but from a particular, quality. For bis name was 

 first applied to an individual tree or other object, in which some 

 particular quality struck him as its most prominent characteristic ; 

 and it was then applied to all individuals which bore a general resem- 

 blance to the first individual tree or other object named, though the 

 difference might be wide indeed, and the particular quality which 

 was the cause of the original name entirely absent. Thus general 

 names, as used in primitive speech, arose from confusion, from in- 

 ability to distinguish. differences or failure to notice them, not from 

 any miraculous power of abstraction and generalization, a power 

 utterly wanting in the savage, i.e. in the primitive man of the present 

 day. So a child will call a butterfiy a bird, as it was originally called 

 a fly, on account of the particular quality of flying common to both ,•: 

 and a leech a fish, because both swim ; and most people call a whale 

 a fish, because they are ignorant of the difference. So the South Sea 

 Islanders called the horse a "man-carrying pig," according to the Rev. 

 William Ellis, "the hog being the quadruped with which they were 

 most familiar, and the name serving in their limited vocabulary as 

 the generic designation for every other four-footed beast." f Now, 



* Op. ait.., p> 220. 



•f Life of W. Ellis, p. 38. 



