EARL.Y HISTORY OF MANKIND. 16\ 



speech itself, when we judge of it as a natural fact, we 

 see only a result of some of those superior endowments of 

 which so many others have fallen to our lot through the 

 medium of an improved or advanced organization. 



The first and most obvious natural endowment concern- 

 ed in speech is that peculiar organization of the larynx, 

 trachea, and mouth which enables us to produce the va- 

 rious sounds required in the case. Man started at first 

 with this organization ready for use, a constitution of the 

 atmosphere adapted for the sounds which that organiza- 

 tion was calculated to produce, and, lastly, but not leastly, 

 as will afterwards be more particularly shown, a mental 

 power within, prompting to, and giving directions for, the 

 expression of ideas. Such an arrangement of mutually 

 adapted things was as likely to produce sounds as an 

 ^Eolian harp placed in a draught is to produce tones. It 

 was unavoidable that human beings so organized, and in 

 such a relation to external nature, should utter sounds, 

 and also come to attach to these conventional meanings, 

 thus forming the elements of spoken language. The 

 great difficulty which has been felt was to account for 

 man going in this respect beyond the inferior animals. 

 There could have been no such difficulty if speculators in 

 this class of subjects had looked into physiology for an ac- 

 count of the superior vocal organization of man, and had 

 they possessed a true science of mind to show man pos- 

 sessing a faculty for the expression of ideas which is only 

 rudimental in the lower animals. Another difficulty has 

 been in the consideration that, if men were at first utterly 

 untutored and barbarous, they could scarcely be in a con- 

 dition to form or employ language — an instrument which 

 it requires the fullest powers of thought to analyze and 

 speculate upon. But this difficulty also vanishes upon 

 reflection — for, in the first place, we are not bound to sup- 



Eose the fathers of our race early attaining to great pro- 

 ciency in language ; and, in the second, language itself 

 seems to be amongst the least difficult to be acquired, if 

 we can form any judgment from what we see in children, 

 most of whom have, by three years of age, while their 

 information and judgment are still as nothing, mastered 

 and familiarized themselves with a quantity of words, in- 

 finitely exceeding m proportion what they acquire in the 

 course of any subsequent or similar portion of time. 

 Discussions as to which parts of speech were first 

 13 



