160 
ec All that the man, the living soul, calls it, that is its name.” 
(I translate literally from the Hebrew. The LXX and ^our 
version prefer (C all that Adam called it, the living soul 
“ whatsoever Adam called any living creature.”) Man, with 
the gift of reason, had appended to it, either as a property or 
an inseparable accident (to speak in logical fashion), the gift of 
speech, — the gift of producing various articulate sounds as 
representatives of the various objects and actions coming 
before his notice, and cognizable by his reason. The primary 
language, then, must have been formed by onomatopoeia (the 
applying names taken from sounds or peculiarity of external 
appearance). I cannot hold with Goropius Becanus, that this 
language was German or Flemish; nor with the Welshman I 
have read of, who claimed the honour of primevalism for his 
own native tongue ; nor yet can I accept the argument of 
Bishop Patrick and others (borrowed from or suggested by 
St. Augustin, de Civ. Dei, xvi. 11), that as Adam conversed 
with Methuselah, Methuselah with Shem, Shem with Jacob, 
the language of Jacob and his people must have been the 
same with that of Adam. The long lives of the patriarchs 
must have contributed to a regular and orderly development 
of the first articulate utterances of the first man into a real 
language capable of expressing the relations of time and 
mutual action. It is not to be conceived that men endued 
with the gift of speech, and all that that gift comprises, went 
on from year to year of an extended life without finding some 
means to express not only the varied objects which were pre- 
sented to them, but the varied relations in which those objects 
stood to one another. The Scripture account favours the view 
that poetry was rapidly evolved in the elder branch of the 
Adamite race. The address of Lamech, sixth from Adam, to 
his wives is given in a poetical form in Hebrew. There can be 
little doubt that it is a metrical translation of an antediluvian 
poem preserved by direct tradition in the younger Adamite 
house, though originating in the elder, and rendered into the 
poetry of the age from generation to generation, as time went 
on and the language altered. The book of Genesis gives us, of 
course, the current Hebrew version at the time of Moses ol 
this remarkable composition. 
The centuries (nearly seventeen according to the ordinary 
reckoning) which intervened between the Creation and the 
Flood afforded time for the organization and solidification of 
the primeval speech. And as there was then no element of 
mutual repulsion, the development was all in one . direction, 
and each man and set of men contributed something to the 
improvement of the language, not to increasing the widtn o 
