12 VOCAL SOUNDS OF 



converses, having learned, but not having been told, that somehovi' or other v^^e 

 perceive this sign, or that it produces upon us the desired effect, although she is 

 unable to solve the great riddle of the process by which this is done. Laura, 

 far below our domestic animals, so far as the senses are concerned, but infinitely 

 above them because she is endowed with a human mind, has attained to the 

 abstractions of affirmation and negation at a very early age, while no dog or ele- 

 phant, however sagacious, has been known to rise to these simple ideas, for 

 which every moment even of animal existence calls, wherever reflection sways 

 over the naked fact. 



Laura, then, independently of sight and hearing — the two most suggestive 

 senses in every thing that appertains to language — felt an impulsive urgency to 

 utter sounds as symphenomena of emotions, or vivid ideas, in common with all 

 those human beings who have not attained to a language properly so called ; 

 but at the very outset she met with the following obstacles : 



Laura cannot hear her own voice ; nor can she perceive the tones of others. 

 She could not, therefore, learn to modify, vary, and articulate them according to 

 a developed language, which is the successive work of many and long periods 

 of civilization. How much our tones, in their infinite and significant modula- 

 tions, owe to the fact that we move in a speaking society from earliest infancy, 

 becomes manifest, when we consider the uncouth, broken, and animal sounds of 

 the lowest savages, and, on the other hand, that even the utterances of the brute 

 are modified by their intercourse with man. Mr. Jesse, in his Anecdotes of 

 Dogs, London, 1846, ascribes this effect of the never-ceasing and ever-varying 

 hum of civilization to these animals. " It is," he says, " I believe, a fact, and if 

 so a cui'ious one, that the dog in a wild state only howls; but when he becomes 

 the friend and companion of man, he has, then, wants and wishes, hopes and 

 fears, joys and sorrows, to which in his wilder state he appears to have been a 

 stranger. His vocabulary, if it may be so called, then increases, in order to 

 express his enlarged and varied emotions." Of course Mr. Jesse cannot mean 

 by the words " in order to express," anything like inventive purpose on the part 

 of the dog, but he must mean a combined effect of the widened circle of emo- 

 tions in the animal, and the multiplied sounds of civilization which surround it, 

 especially of the master's language or other tones addressed to it. 



The second great obstacle for Laura was, that she did not perceive the effect 

 produced, in each case, by her sounds upon others. The idea of a specific 

 force and value of a certain sound, which directly leads to the conception of 

 the name or word, and facilitates all the means of designation, and of combin- 

 ing these means, could not easily, and never perfectly, appear to her. I shall 

 presently dwell more at length upon this point. 



Lastly, Laura was positively interrupted in the formation even of her imper- 

 fect and elementary phonetic language, as I have stated before, in order to make 

 her a being of intercourse in our society — in order to attach her as a living 

 member to the community of civilization. This could not have been done had 

 she been allowed freely to indulge in the harsh and grating sounds which 



