THE SPEECH OF MONKEYS. 145 



sound to meet those increased demands for ex- 

 pression. It appears only reasonable to me that 

 thought must precede, in point of time and order, 

 any expression of thought ; for thought is the mo- 

 tive of expression, and the expression of thought 

 in oral sounds is speech. Speech is not an in- 

 vention, and therefore is not symbolic in its 

 radical nature. True, that much that is symbolic 

 has been added to it, and its bounds have been 

 widened as man has risen in the scale of civil 

 life, until our higher types of modern speech 

 have departed so far from the natural modes of 

 speech and first forms of expression that we can 

 rarely trace a single word to its ultimate source. 

 And viewing it as we do from our present stand- 

 point, it appears to be purely symbolic; but if 

 that be so, then we must deny the first law of 

 progress, and assign the origin of this faculty 

 to that class of phenomena known as miracles, 

 which once explained, by increasing the mystery, 

 what we could not understand, and served at 

 the same time to conceal the exact magnitude of 

 our ignorance ; but as we added little by little to 

 our stock of knowledge, such phenomena were 

 brought within the realm of our understanding, 



and to-day our children are familiar with the 

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