l899-'00 TRANSACTIONS 97 



elements, and certainly as being indispensable to the very ex- 

 istence of language. We were certain that Adam knew them in 

 the Garden of Eden, and in all probability named them after he 

 had got through naming the animals. Such is not the scientific 

 view however. Science tells us of a time when there was speech, 

 but no parts of speech. " We are accustomed," says Sayce in 

 his " Science of Language," " to see sentences divided into their 

 individual words, and so we come to imagine that this is right 

 and natural. But the very accent we lay upon our words ought 

 to show us that this is far from the truth. The accent of the 

 word varies according to its place in the sentence ; for the purpose 

 of accent we regard, not the individual words, but the whole 

 sentence which they compose." The sentence therefore, is the 

 unit of significant speech and therefore — to quote Sayce again — 

 " all individual words must once have been sentences ; that is to 

 say, when first used, they must each have implied or represented 

 a sentence." It would really be more correct to say that words 

 resulted from the disintegration, or analysis of sentences, than 

 that sentences resulted from the combination of words. 



This may seem a hard doctrine, particularly to those who are 

 in actual possession of a highly analytical form of speech such as 

 the English language ; but I am speaking now of language 

 in its earliest stages and not as the finished instrument of the 

 most advanced and intellectual races of mankind. Still the 

 question may be pressed how it is possible, if sentences were 

 made up of a number of distinct parts or articulations, that those 

 parts were not prior in origin to the whole which they com- 

 posed. In reply let us ask the question which I think is a parallel 

 one : if the human body is made up of various tissues, must not 

 those tissues have existed before they came together to form the 

 body ? In both cases we are confronted with one of the mysteries 

 of life and organization. The sentence lives as the body lives ; 

 as a whole it expresses a meaning ; sever it if you can into parts, 

 and as a whole it dies and the parts die. Everyone knows how 

 much difiiculty is experienced in obtaining vocabularies of savage 

 dialects, mainly owing to the fact that the savages, with all the 

 good will in the world, either cannot tell where one word ends 

 and another begins, or cannot give the word you want except 

 in combination with some word you do not want. We need not, 

 however, go to savage tribes for examples of this. Uneducated 



