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return you my thanks, and I think I may say those of all present (hear, hear ) 
for your very able and lucid introductory remarks. Everybody must be glad 
to be told that he may be a Christian and a man of science at the same time • 
and that if he reads the Bible, he need not fling away science, or if he’ 
studies science he need not fling away the Bible. (Hear, hear.) I beg also 
to offer a few remarks on the paper of Professor Young ; in doing which I 
shall not detain you long.-I would say to the learned Professor, that I 
listened to his paper with interest ; and if I take the liberty of criticism o it 
it is not because I deny his facts, or disagree with his conclusion. I think he’ 
has stated Ins argument from probability very clearly. He says it is probable 
that man would not have supplied a spoken language for himself out of his 
own powers ; therefore it must have been given him, as he has it, from above 
I believe that it was given him from above ; but not for this reason ; and we 
must be careful, while defending a truth, to defend it with correct arguments • 
for a weak argument is an evil ; and therefore, if we bring forward°a proba- 
bility which will not hold water, we are really doing harm to truth I 
would suggest to the Professor, whether those signs, which he so clearly put 
before us, are really capable of forming a language ? I foil to see in them a 
power of representing complicated objects. I can understand their represent- 
ing the sun, or the moon, or the stars ; but how represent a special thought el- 
even a particular animal by a sign of that kind 1 It is there that articulation 
steps in. A man has a certain feeling or emotion, for instance ; he strives 
to express it, and utters a sound ; but his utterances are inarticulate What 
are they ? Sounds not yet reduced to law. When they are reduced to law 
they are articulate. There is no more inarticulate sound than “ Boo ■” but 
that ill Greek has the meaning of « bull.” There is “ 0 ” inarticulate, but it 
becomes an articulate sound. The original words of human speech were in- 
articulate sounds, and they were forced by the ehergy of man’s nature, into 
something l*e order and articulate condition. I therefore should say, with 
all due deference to the arguments that Professor Young has placed before us, 
nt primeval language— speaking of course without consideration of what we 
know from revelation-primeval language would be a sort of compound of 
gesture and half-articulate sound gesture to express certain ideas and 
emotions, and sound to express others. One might multiply instances ; but 
to select one. In Hebrew, if the lion is represented, I find the word is the 
bv P »m/^ e T7u a ” ; „ and luCoptic the Egyptian represents the same animal 
by mom. I find in all such names, in the words employed to express both 
emotions and individual objects, a transition from the inarticulate to the 
a ticulate states of sounds ; 'and therefore I suggest, with all due deference 
the Professor, that his theory has only given us half the truth. Is there 
hnlLeot M y ’° n 6 0therside ’ that mau would invent an articulate 
language? Many may remember the sceptical question asked by Tindal in 
Christianity as Old as the Creation, relative to the miracle of Balaam’s 
ass, -how many ideas the ass had ?-and how Waterland points out, in 
answer, that not a syllable is mentioned about ideas ; it is merely said that 
ass spoke ; and he humorously adds that it probably had as many ideas 
u 
