SCIENCE. 



343 



Professor Whitney, of Yale (10), thinks that "there 

 needs to be, perhaps, a radical stirring up of the subject, 

 a ventilation of a somewhat breezy, even gusty order, 

 which shall make woids fly high and noisily against one 

 another before agreement shall be reached. If so, the ! 

 sooner it is brought, in whatever way, the better; and 

 they are no true promoters of the progress of Science 

 who strive to smooth things over on the surface and act j 

 as if all were serene and accordant below." The gentle- 

 man just quoted might have made short work of his op- , 

 ponents had he approached the controversy physiologic- 

 ally. 



M. Renan (u) says: "Languages have sprung forth 

 completely formed trom the veiy mould of the human 

 spirit like Minerva from the head of Jupiter." Schleicher, 

 Steinthal and Miiller are guilty of similar puerilities. The > 

 latter claims that "animals cannot talk because they have 

 no general ideas ; they evidently have no general ideas 

 because they do not talk." This sort of reasoning might 

 be pardonable in scholars of metaphysical tendencies, but 

 when we find Carl Vogt refusing to deal with the ques- i 

 tion, and Haeckel (12) saying, "Our ape-like progenitor ' 

 very ptobably did not possess an articulate language of 

 ideas," the appearance of this essay does not seem to 

 require an apology. To deny, as Mivart (13) does, that 

 "the cat, or any other beast or bird " has the gift of 

 speech, and to base this denial upon man having a peculiar 

 language of sounds and gestures to express his thoughts, 

 is quite as sensible a proceeding as for the woodpecker to 

 taunt man with his inability to drum in its peculiar way. 

 "Psychology," says Mivart, "denotes the study of all the- 

 activities, both simultaneous and successive, which any 

 living creature may exhibit." Mivart, therefore, is the 

 grossest kind of materialist, without knowirg it, for 

 " Psyche," after this definition, consists of motion alone, 

 and this pre-supposes a material origin. Kruse (14) 

 mentions a deaf and dumb lad who, after having acquired 

 a gesture language, told of years of abuse to which he 

 had been subjected by an inhuman father and narrated 

 other details of his previous life. Kussmaul cites this as 

 an evidence of the speech faculty, upon its creation, find- 

 ing everything prepared for it in the way of ideas to 

 convey. The phylogenesis of speech should be studied 

 by proper consideiation of such facts. The dog only 

 needs human speech to tell in words what he thinks 

 and expresses in every other way beside when his master 

 takes a gun to start on a hunt for game. 



We may set aside all consideration of sound in language 

 by remembering that persons entirely deaf may converse 

 in the regular way, "judging of what was said by the 

 movements c f the lips and tongue, which they had 

 learned to connect with particular syllables ; and regulat- 

 ing their own voices in reply by their voluntary power, 

 guided in its exercise by their muscular sensations" (15). 



Speech therefore is the same as any other muscular act 

 under the control of the will. The jaw is a limb, the 

 parts accessory to which and concerned in its move- 

 ments are as susceptible of cultivation as is the arm, and 

 in the matter of speech acquisition, and the gradually 

 better and better subjection to the mind of all bodily 

 parts concerned in its expression. Herbert Spencer's 

 words are applicable though the passages here given had 

 no reference to the point under consideration . 



" Functions, like structures, arise by progressive differ- 

 entiations just as an organ is first an indefinite rudiment 

 having nothing but some most general characteristic in 

 common with the form it is ultimately to take ; so a 

 function begins as a kind of action, that is like the kind 

 of action it will eventually become, only in a very vague 

 way." (16) Thus a "lecture " by the Rev. Joseph Cook 

 was predetermined by the bark of the primordial dog. 

 (Vogt says " let them bark, it is their nature.") 



" In animals, however, besides analogously structural 

 changes wrought during the period of growth by subjec- 

 tion to circumstances unlike the ordinary circumstances, 



there are structural changes similarly wrought after 

 maturity has been reached. Organs that have arrived at 

 their full size possess a certain modifiability." (17) (This 

 I would apply to the structural changes in the brain 

 inevitable upon language learning as well as to those oc- 

 curring through training or drilling in any art or trade in- 

 volving manual dexterity or proficiency.) 



"The growth of muscles exercised to an unusual de- 

 gree is a matter of common observation. In the often 

 cited blacksmith's arm, the dancer's legs, and the 

 jockey's crural adductors we have marked examples of 

 modifiability which almost every one has to some extent 

 experienced. It is needless to multiply proofs. The oc- 

 currence of changes in the stiucture ot the skin when ex- 

 posed to a stress of function is also familiar. That 

 thickening of the epidermis on a laborer's palm results 

 from continuous pressure and friction is certain." * * * 

 " An orchestral conductor gains by continual practice an 

 unusually great ability to discriminate differences of 

 sound, and in the finger reading of the blind we have 

 evidence that the sense of touch may be brought by ex- 

 ercise to a far higher capability than is ordinary. The 

 increase of power which habitual exertion gives to men- 

 tal faculties needs no illustration, every person of educa- 

 tion has personal experience of it." (18) 



Language, therefore, may be regarded as pure gesticu- 

 lation and its perfectibility as dependent upon the gradual 

 evolution of the reasoning powers. of animals. This 

 being the case, it requires but a glance at the construc- 

 tion of the jargons of to-day (by courtesy called lan- 

 guages) to convince us of the very low plane to which 

 man with his much vaunted intellect has arrived. From 

 the teleological standpoint, certainly German with its 

 nonsensical genders, French with its slaughter of letters 

 for euphony sake, and English with its multitude of bar- 

 barisms, must have had more of a malign than divine 

 origin. (But then the tower of Babel story accounts for 

 it all.) Mauc'sley (19) mentions the inability of the 

 Bosjesmen to talk in the dark, owing to their depending 

 more upon signs than vocables for intercommunication. 

 The North American Indians can thus converse without 

 uttering a single sound. Laura Bridgeman may also be 

 mentioned as expressing her thoughts, and even " mut- 

 tering " in her dreams by finger motions. The necessity 

 for such considerations as the foregoing appears in the 

 philological bias which has crept into our physiological 

 literature through the one-sided studies of such men as 

 von Schlegel, and 'through their claims that the perfectly 

 regular and complex construction of languages of many 

 barbarous nations is a proof of the divine origin of lan- 

 guage. By placing language upon an equal footing with 

 all other voluntary gestures we see at once that speech is 

 entitled to no more regard than any other set of complex 

 motions performed by any animal to subserve rational 

 purposes. We cannot deny the possession of rational 

 language to animals when we see them conveying their 

 x thoughts and desires with, and without sounds, by 

 menaces, contortions, glarings, and a multitude of 

 other movements. I have known mules and oxen 

 on the arid plains of the West to acquaint a 

 thirsty heid half a mile away that water has been dis- 

 covered. All of us know of the hen's ability to talk to its 

 chickens. The most perfect rhetoric and oratory of man 

 can be said, therefore, to differ from these animal expres- 

 j sions only in degree, and often the most pretentious dis- 

 course conveys fewer ideas than the cluck of a hen or 

 the growl of a dcg. A pure linguist, hence, can claim 

 but little more in an intellectual way than a pure gym- 

 Dast. Different groups of muscles, nerves, bones, etc., 

 are exercised and cultivated by each. Man can claim 

 no more for developing adroitness in the use of his jaws, 

 lips, tongue and larynx than any animal which, finding 

 itself in possession of certain other limbs and groups of 

 muscles turns them to the utmost possible advantage. 

 The great function of the jaw was masticatory, its use 



