80 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD- LANGUAGE. 



whetlier they do so or not, from one competent judge in sucti 

 a matter, Dr. Scott, of Exeter, who assures me that semi- 

 idiotic children, to whom there is no hope of teaching more 

 than the merest rudiments of speech, are yet capable of re- 

 ceiving a considerable amount of knowledge by means of signs, 

 and of expressing themselves by them. It is well known that 

 a certain class of children are dumb from deficiency of intellect, 

 rather than from want of the sense of hearing, and it is to 

 these that the observation applies.^ 



The idea of solving the problem of the origin of language 

 by actual experiment, must have very often been started. 

 There are several stories of such an experiment having been 

 tried, the first being Herodotus's well-known tale of Psamm- 

 tichus. King of Egypt, who had the two children brought up 

 by a silent keeper, and suckled by goats. The first word they 

 said, hekos, meaning bread in the Phrygian language, of course 

 proved that the Phrygians were the oldest race of mankind. 

 It is a very trite remark that there is nothing absolutely in- 

 credible in the story, and that beh, hel-, is a good imitative 

 word for bleating, as in ^r)')(^do/j,at, fj,r)Kdo/u,ai,, bloken, meckern, 

 etc. But the very name of Psammitichus, who has served as a 

 lay-figure for so many tales to be draped upon, is fatal to any 

 claim to the historical credibility of such a story. He sounds 

 the springs of the Nile with a cord thousands of fathoms long, 

 and finds no bottom; he accomplishes the prediction of one 

 oracle by pouring a libation out of a brazen helmet, and of 

 another, concerning cocks, by leading an army of Carians, with 

 crested helmets, against Tementhes, king of Egypt, and he 

 figures in the Greek version of the story of CinderelWs slipper. 

 It is interesting to see how naturally mythology takes to the 

 bekos-legend, and brings it out in a new place. Miss Good- 

 man says, " A Scotch lady staying in the house, informed me 

 that one of the early kings of her country, anxious to discover the 



be seen in the difSculty, so constantly met with in investigating the languages of 

 rude tribes, of getting a substantive from a native without a personal pronoun 

 tacked to it. Thus in Dr. Milliga,n's vocabulary, the expressions yuggan neena, 

 noonahneena, given for " husband" and "father," seem really to mean "your hus- 

 band," "my father," or something of the kind. 



1 See W. R. Scott, ' Remarks on the Education of Idiots ;' London, 1847. 



