THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 131 



But — admitting that primitive men, barbarians as they were, had the 

 mental capacity which enabled them to invent these general or abstract 

 roots — it will naturally be asked how we can suppose that very young 

 children, whom our theory regards as the first framers of every lan- 

 guage, can have possessed this remarkable faculty. Fortunately, we are 

 able to answer this question, not by argument, but by a direct instance ; 

 and in such a case, one instance is as decisive as a thousand. The little 

 nephew of Professor von der Gabelentz, a mere baby, just beginning to 

 speak, had invented a root as abstract as the Algonkin sha or gisch, 

 and with it a formative system seemingly more subtle and metaphysical 

 than the Algonkin, inasmuch as the changes of meaning were indicated, 

 after the Semitic fashion, not by affixed particles, but by internal 

 vowel changes. Mum was a flat, circular object of the largest size, the 

 table ; mem was a smaller disk, — a plate, a watch, or the moon ; and 

 when the child was shown at night the " floor of heaven," as Shaks- 

 peare's fanciful lover styles it, " thick inlaid with patines of bright 

 gold," he exclaimed, with an instant application of his most diminutive 

 inflection, " mhn, mim, mim." Here is an indubitable root, springing 

 from the language-making instinct of an infant, which equals, and in 

 some respects surpasses, those primary elements of speech with which 

 the able investigators of the Aryan, Semitic, and American languages 

 — the Benfeys and Mas Miillers, the Ewalds and Kenans, the Trum- 

 bulls and Brintons — have made us familiar. Yet there is really nothing 

 in this which need astonish us. If the language-making faculty is, 

 like the faculty of sight, a natural endowment and instinct of the 

 human being, we might reasonably expect that a child who can, with- 

 out eff"ort or consciousness, see a table, a plate, or a star, as clearly as a 

 sage can see them, should be able, without effort or consciousness, to 

 name these objects as aptly as a sage could name them. 



We are thus brought back, by the clearest facts and inductions, to 

 the thesis with which our study of the subject began. We find by 

 evidence drawn from the most varied and the most authentic sources — 

 from the utterances of children and the idioms of the most uncultivated 

 tribes — that language owes its origin to a cause which is as active at the 

 present day as it was when speaking man made his first appearance on 

 the earth. To this cause — the language-making instinct of young 

 children — all the great variety of primitive languages, or linguistic 



