99 
of Edinburgh, Session 1875 - 76 . 
ment. On the one hand, Muller, who had had a great influence in 
guiding public opinion in this region, stoutly asserted that out of 
the three primal elements, as from a root, no further growth of 
what we called human language, for reasonable social purposes, 
could take place; while, on the other hand, Wedgwood — who in 
this whole matter had, in his opinion, received scant recognition 
from the scholars of his own country — as stoutly maintained that 
from these three elements, as their natural root, the whole organism 
of the beautiful growth of language, stem, leaf, and fruit, could be 
satisfactorily explained. After carefully studying the arguments 
of the learned Oxford Professor, he was of opinion that Wedgwood 
was in the main right. To this conclusion he came from a course 
of independent investigation some years ago, and when, curiously 
enough, he had only used Wedgwood’s dictionary for occasional 
consultation, without having read and pondered the discourse prefixed 
to the last edition of that work. The grounds of his opposition to 
Muller were stated to be simply these : — While in perfect agree- 
ment with him that roots significant of ideas are the ultimate facts 
in the analysis of languages as we now have them, and believing 
also that such conceptional roots are the natural and necessary ex- 
pression of reason in a reasoning animal, and explicable only on the 
supposition of an indwelling plastic reason in man, I am at the 
same time unable to see why this plastic reason in the formative 
process of language-making should not have used the materials so 
amply supplied by the interjectional and mimetic elements of the 
simplest germs of speech. The interjectional element, I call the 
principle of significant vocal response ; and the onomatopoetic prin- 
ciple, I call the mimetic, dramatic, or pictorial element in language; 
and I am prepared to show that, even under the many defacements 
and obliterations which spoken words, like old sixpences or wave- 
worn pebbles, suffer from the tear and wear of time, they yet show 
in hundreds of cases on their face the manifest superscription of 
their mimetic origin. For we must take note, first, that not only 
pigs and cuckoos, cats, curs, and crows, but all nature, is full of 
sounds, and that there is no absolute silence anywhere but in death ; 
and, further, that not only an immense variety of sounds can be 
approximately expressed by imitation in articulated vocal breath, 
but that by an easy transference the impressions of the other senses 
can be analogically expressed in the flexible material of significant 
