3 GO 
His second proposition, on tlie other hand, that the faculty of 
speech is Immaterial , requires vastly more evidence to establish it 
than has been adduced. The truth of the second proposition 
certainly does not follow from the acceptance of the first, as the 
same argument, if I mistake not, would establish the immateriality 
of man’s powers of calculating, or of playing chess. 
Even were the immateriality of articulate language proved, how- 
ever, it does not seriously affect the question of the origin of the 
human race. It is surely quite as conceivable that this faculty of 
speech was bestowed upon, if not acquired by some pre-existing 
form, as that some other form was by a special act of creation called 
into existence to receive it. A belief in the immateriality of the 
soul is not in any way affected by the fact that each infant who 
enters the world does so, not in opposition to, but in conformity 
with, the reign of law. 
The power of articulating, as Dr. Bateman says, is evidently not 
immaterial, for parrots can talk, and it has not only been found 
possible to construct the telephone, by which messages are carried 
to a distance and exactly reproduced by a magnetic current, but 
also that most extraordinary machine, the talking phonograph, 
which by purely mechanical means causes a disc of iron to vibrate, 
and to utter articulate words. Articulate speech, thus shown to be 
as simply a mechanical act as the production of a musical sound, is 
an instrument used by man for conveying his ideas to his fellows, a 
much more perfect one indeed than that of the bird who by different 
notes communicates with its mate, but they are both of them 
instruments, and there is not so much difference between them as 
there is between that which they are the means of expressing. 
The difference between man and other animals is thus not so much 
the being able to use articulate speech, as that the former possesses 
so much more reason than the latter, that he can associate words 
with ideas, which they are unable to do. A savage placed in the 
laboratory of a physicist would be unable to perform the simplest 
experiment. A parrot taught to speak can make no practical use 
of its acquirement. 
It is somewhat difficult to understand exactly what Dr. Bateman 
