135 
difficulty in understanding that he expressed these concepts 
in names which to him were true, and therefore scientific. In 
this way all the substantives that he needed would be formed. * 
In like manner we must suppose him capable of perceiving 
the operation of force. We need not claim for him intnitive 
perception, but suppose that, like his sons, he attained to 
perception and conception by examination and experience. 
When he had the perception, where is the difficulty in his 
expressing it in a word which he understood, and which Eve 
and their children understood ? But in this expression of the 
concept of force in operation we have the verbs. Thus with 
the substantives and verbs, and their relation to each other, — 
carrying with more or less completeness, according to accu- 
racy of observation and carefulness of thought, all subsidiary 
grammatical forms, — we have a true and sufficient language 
involved in the original power of speech. It is after this manner 
that the Bible shows language to have been used by primitive 
man.* Here, however, we have no dictionary or grammar, 
either printed or written and given in a book, or by oral 
revelation, but a language springing out of the nature and 
condition of man, adequate from the first, and one which 
would grow as objects multiplied, forces varied, and relations 
became more complex. We readily admit that “man must 
conquer everything by the sweat of his face/'’ language like 
everything elsej but we would remind Mr. Muller that the 
authority whence he quotes the above aphorism shows man 
to have been able to use and understand language before the 
necessity was imposed. Words are the counters of thought, 
and a sufficient supply must be obtained before we can express 
the thought ; but according to the range, the complexity, and 
the depth of the thought, will be the variety and richness of 
the forms in which it is expressed. To us there seems no 
difficulty in understanding the growth of language from such 
an origin, but we cannot understand how a community could 
have existed who were obliged to put the poor “ mar ” to a 
thousand uses. And we have still greater difficulty in under- 
standing how a conference for the elaboration of the terms 
and structure of a language could have succeeded when only 
mar , mar , mar could have been uttered as the vocal sign of 
all work. We know that no language has thus been produced, 
but that its various forms have obtained currency by use. 
But, in the case above supposed, you have a community with- 
out a language, and consequently without a current in which 
thought can flow, and, as it seems to ns, there is no means of 
VOL. XV. 
* Genesis ii. 19. 
L 
