339 
speech and used signs, so that they became able to understand 
each other.* Plutarch, too, records an Egyptian tradition that 
until the god Teti (Thoth) taught men language, they used 
mere cries, like other animals. 
But what the ancients were ignorant of is the great principle 
of the gradual tranformations, avatars, descent, or rather (as 
Prof. Goldwin Smith well observes) s ascent 5 of man. Though 
at present I see no reason to accept the evolutionary view 
(which I regard as being what lawyers would call a “ bare 
possibility,” and to be rejected, amongst other reasons, by virtue 
of the principle of fixity of type), I do not wish to ridicule it. 
Prof. Sayce expresses the theory in no unfriendly spirit : — 
“ Between the ape and man the evolutionist has inserted his 
homo alcdus , 4 speechless man,’ whose relics may yet [or may 
not] be discovered in Central Africa, or in the submerged con- 
tinent of the Indian Ocean. Wherever the conditions were 
favourable, homo ctlalus developed into homo primigenius , 
whose first records are the unworked flints of countless ages ago. 
Where the conditions were unfavourable, there was retrogression 
instead of progress, and homo cdalus became the progenitor of 
the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the gibbon, and the orang-otang. 
Such is the theory which post-tertiary geology can alone verify 
or confute.”! 
The theory, then, is “not proven,” and we must wait and see 
what geology will do for us in the matter ; again, it cannot be 
absolutely refuted, because we cannot demonstrate an absolute 
negative on the point. We should be fully justified in letting 
this theory stand aside for the present, but it is perhaps more 
satisfactory to give it a brief examination with the aid of the 
evidence available. There is plenty of decided opinion on the 
matter ; thus Mr. Darwin remarks : — 
“ I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imita- 
tion and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of 
other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries, aided by signs 
and gestures.”! 
Here the elements of language are said to be Imitation, 
which of course produces modification, Ejaculations, and Gesture. 
This latter is undoubtedly a most valuable adjunct. Prof. 
Sayce, too, as we have seen,§ founds language on Gesture, Ono- 
* Diod. Sik., i. 8. 
t Introd. Sci. Lang. ii. 310. All students of the question should care- 
fully consider Dr. Elam’s acute and caustic criticisms {Winds of Doctrine, 
and The Gospel of Evolution , in the Contemporary Review , May, 1880). 
% Descent of Man , i., 87. § Sup., Sec. 10. 
