244 
to signify that onr going on would lead to heads being cut off; 
but whether they or we were to be the sufferers was not very 
clear. - ” — {J^oyuge to Loo-Choo } second edition, p. 11.) 
It has been affirmed, both by ancient poets and modern 
visionaries, that primitive man must have herded with the 
beasts of the field, feeding on acorns and on the roots he could 
scratch up with his fingers. This imagined association with 
brutes could never be. The two parties could not communi- 
cate; the language of human gesture, as a medium of social 
intercourse, could be intelligible only to human beings, who 
would therefore naturally and necessarily congregate together 
in a wholly distinct and separate society. A single human 
being, having no such society, could, of course, have no other 
companionship. T . 
But it is time that I brought this paper to a close. In the 
course of it I have not insisted on the absolute impossi- 
bility of man inventing speech ; I have merely aimed at 
showing, bv an appeal to facts and to reasonable consi era 
tions, that," even admitting his ability, the improbability ot 
his actually doing so is very great; for I feel less hesitation 
in affirming that he would not do it, than that he could not 
do it • and this because, cast about as I may, I cannot discover 
anything in the low condition, hypothetically assigned to him, 
to stimulate him to the undertaking. When I find it to be a 
fact that the natural language of gesture, which every human 
being possesses, is amply sufficient for all his social require- 
ments in such a primitive uncivilized state; when I find it to 
be a fact that when the spoken language of a person who has 
employed it from infancy, and which has become natural to 
him— his vernacular tongue,- becomes to that person changed 
to a non-natural system of organic actions merely, he being 
conscious of nothing more— nothing that is nature s own,— that 
this non-natural speech is repulsive to him, _ that he would 
rather have none at all, I ask myself m vain. Why should 
primitive speechless man invent artificial language i With a 
natural and expressive means of intercourse commensurate 
with all the demands of his then condition, why should he be 
at the trouble even of devising and settling by general compact 
another language, consisting of symbols purely conventional 
and artificial ? To these questions no satisfactory answers 
suggest themselves to my mind. . „ 
I reflect, too, that civilization presupposes the exercise ot 
speech ; and, yet, that a considerable advance m civilization 
must precede the invention of speech ; and that no result can 
chronologically be antecedent to that which brings it about. 1 
bear in mind, further, that those who never possessed a tacuity 
