THE SPEECH OF MONKEYS. l$Q 



lations to each other, and these are often qualified 

 by other words of less importance. This redun- 

 dancy is due to the higher and more complex 

 modes of thought used by man, and it is on such 

 a state of facts that we have founded that branch 

 of science called grammar, which would be of 

 little use among those forms which occupy the 

 planes of life inferior to man ; and it is found of 

 little use among the lower tribes of man, where 

 it does not exist in any written form. Grammar 

 does not make language, but serves as a kind of 

 anchor by which the dialects of human speech 

 are somewhat unified and made more stable, and 

 to this is due in some measure the fact that sav- 

 age tongues and dialects are more susceptible to 

 change in their structure, while the phonetic 

 basis upon which they rest remains the same. 



In the more refined tongues of human speech 

 we go beyond that code of laws called grammar 

 and amplify them into rhetoric. This branch of 

 the science of speech could find no place among 

 the lower types, as the words are few from which 

 they may select, and so exact and arbitrary is the 

 meaning of each one and so uniform the rela- 

 tions that no great variety of expression can be 

 made with such a limited vocabulary. Their 



