68 THE SUBANU. 
neighbors. Against this provisionally formed impression militate two 
important facts; the former is that we have no data, other than infer- 
ence wholly from outside, upon which to base a valuation of relative 
age in the vocabulary which now for the first time comes to us in a very 
disheveled mass, but all essentially modern; the latter is that the his- 
toric record, as presented by Colonel Finley in Part I of this volume, 
makes it plain that the Subanu shrank, and with the best of good 
reason, from intercourse with their more advanced neighbors. ‘This 
impression may therefore, and quite properly, be dismissed. 
I believe that we have here a far more interesting and philologi- 
cally important principle at work; that we are not dealing with a later 
and refining process of speech, but with a rude and primitive principle 
effecting word formation at a stage when words are things to be created 
by evolution of speech power. ‘This apparently anomalous assumption 
of initial affects the palatal mute. In terms of speech evolution we see 
that this is an activity of the first of the speech-organs to come under 
control and that so far as relates to that organ it is the result of the 
maximum speech effort; for the variety of c and g is here negligible, 
since 1t amounts to a mere shading of the manner of vibration at the 
exit time and place of the sound formed by the particular closure. In 
this view I regard the assumed initial as appulse. 
I have employed this term in connection with the explanation of 
our English onomatopees formed in the effort to create words to denom- 
inate descriptively the familiar cries of our domestic companions to 
whom true speech has not yet come in facilitation of the small ideas 
which they try so hard to communicate to us. Appulse is the initial of 
all sound, the beginning of the characteristic vibration from a state of 
rest. It does not exist in sound; it is an interpretation through the ear 
and in the auditory centers of the brain of the suddenness of existence of 
a sound out of stillness. Here I credit it to the interpretation of a very 
rude human speech. Hitherto I have credited it to the interpretation 
of the cries of barnyard animals. It is yet more general, for as it does 
not qualify sound in itself, but does qualify aural interpretation of 
sound, we may sense appulse even in mechanically produced vibrations. 
In littoral conditions of abode I am well within the range of a steam 
siren, say at a distance of four miles. During still winter nights, when 
falling snow draws a curtain against the harbor mouth, I can hear the 
blast of that instrument whose monotone is more prophylactic than 
musically pleasing. Four times in each minute the air is filled with a 
wailing sound which is essentially vocalic, yet four times in each minute 
my sensorium reads into it an initial consonant, the maximum effort of 
the labials. I hear Pooo-Pooo. Noram I singular in this; it is not a 
matter of the personal equation of the observer; it has gone into our 
speech in the onomatopee “‘puff.”’ Thus the appulse is our misread- 
ing of the change from silence to sound; we go a trifle too far and read a 
