with the faculty of speaking; they could not have invented that; and supplied with the faculty, there is no more theoretical difficulty in supposing the first man to have spoken than the second, nor to have spoken on the first day of his existence than on the ten-thousandth.

The second doctrine, though vouched for by many learned men, is little less objectionable. In one sense assuredly language was, like all man's other endowments, a divine gift. But to suppose him to have been first made, and then the faculty of speech, or an actual vocabulary miraculously conferred upon him, is little less than absurd. A being without the faculty of speech was surely not man: with the faculty of speech, why not leave him to the natural exercise of this, as of his other faculties? Why assume a miracle to supply what belongs to him by the very laws of his being? And if it was necessary for God to provide him miraculously with a language, it would seem equally necessary to furnish him miraculously with the means of understanding it. What he had the faculty of comprehending, we do not see why he had not the faculty of originating.

Is language then an immediate, natural, necessary product of man's peculiar rational constitution? Is rational speech as much the offspring of the higher human organism, as their natural inarticulate cries are of the lower, irrational nature of the brutes? So we firmly believe. To our mind all the facts and phenomena of language tend irresistibly to this conclusion. The intimate connection between reason and speech is clearly shadowed forth in the Greek word orog, in which, with characteristic sagacity, that marvellous people seem to have divined the true nature and origin of language. It is involved in that law of the human mind which makes it an almost utter, if not an absolute, impossibility to pursue any extended process of thought, to perform any act of generalization, and hold together any set of complex ideas, without the aid of language. We almost doubt whether man can have a clear and distinct conception, even of an individual object, without investing it with a name; we are quite sure that he cannot, from the very nature of his organization, pursue any distinct

line of thought without language, and the first distinct and full-born thought that visited humanity signalizes, we believe, the birth-hour of language. The one is not a whit more mysterious than the other. If he could think, why could he not speak? That is to say, He who made him capable of the act of thought, could also make him capable of the accompanying act of speech. At this point, in speech and reason, man completely parts company from the brute. Brutes have, as Aristotle would have said, the nutritive soul and the sensitive soul in common with man. Like men, they see, hear, smell, taste and feel. Like men, they remember and desire, love and hate, cherish gratitude and revenge. In many respects they have a sort of shadowy and dream-like imitation of the higher life. of humanity. But wherever and however we are to draw the precise line, there is a broad, distinct, undeniable line between the brute and the human world. This line lies, too, not merely and not, perhaps, primarily in the moral attributes of humanity. It lies in those rational attributes which alone constitute any fitting basis of moral responsibility. It matters little in truth where we draw the line theoretically. The barrier which rational speech raises between man and brute is one which no brute has ever made the slightest attempt to overpass, or in which it has taken the first step that brought it nearer to humanity. Brutes never took a step toward organizing a civil government; never conceived the idea of constructing a printing press, or establishing a newspaper; never produced the first line of an epic poem; never thought of having their daguer reotypes taken, for the comfort of their posterity; never went abroad on travels of discovery, nor established learned societies for the purpose of promoting and registering the progress of science. To think of the most highly educated dog taking his seat in a session of learned pundits, and gravely bow-wow-ing his dissent from some theory respecting Sir William Hamilton's analytic! Brutes may be immortal. For ourselves we do not believe it. We believe that it takes a deeper, broader, stronger volume of life than swells in the soul of a brute to roll through the sands of time into the ocean of eternity. But be that as it may, rational speech, i. e. rea

son with its attendant speech, speech with its parent reason, form a barrier between the two orders of existence which brutes cannot elevate themselves, nor men sink themselves sufficiently, even to dream of crossing.

A just view of the origin of speech virtually disposes of two other questions, viz: by what law, in what manner, these verbal roots originated. Were they originated on the principle of imitation, a doctrine which Prof. Müller with quiet contempt designates as the "bow-wow" theory; or did they originate in interjections, which doctrine he marks as the "poopoo" theory? The latter is not worth a moment's notice; for where the language of interjections ends, rational speech really begins. The former, too, has very little to say for itself, so long as the imitation is restricted to the imitation of the coarse, palpable sounds of external nature. A language so constructed, could go but a small way towards supplying the manifold demands of man's rational soul, for words framed on the strictly imitative principle, like cuckoo, are the most unflexible and least prolific words in language, and admit hardly any extension to general ideas. Neither the facts nor the philosophy of the case warrant our regarding the vast, magnificent, spiritual structure of human speech as built up out of the very meagre materials furnished by the onomatopoëtic or bow-wow principle. Take a simple illustration. If any word would have been bow-wow-ically formed, it would have seemed likely to be thunder. And yet thunder, donner, tonitru, formidable sounding words as they are, are demonstrably from a Sanscrit root tan, to stretch (in which the roar and rumble are not heard at all), and are actually identical in origin with tendre, tender, and thin. Thus dissolve away onomatopoëtic dreams, under the wand of Etymology.

For a modified form of this theory, there may perhaps a good deal be said. That there is in the mind a certain connection between specific ideas and certain combinations of soundswhich would, for instance, select vowels and liquid or softer consonants for softer conceptions, and harder and harsher elements for a corresponding class of ideas-seems hardly deniable; and that this principle may have operated to no

slight extent in the original production of roots, we see no reason for denying.

But recurring to the origin of roots, it has been a question whether the first words were general, or specific: whether men first named an individual cave, and then transferred the name to all caves; or whether they first invented the general term, and then gave it an individual application. Prof. Müller virtually combines and harmonizes both views. The actual name was first given to the individual; but the name itself was generic; it expressed a generic idea; that is, it was founded upon some property or attribute of the object named. Thus antrum is a kindred form to internum. The cave was so designated, because it was the man's within the same idea which led also to the name Evtepov. Under another aspect, from cavo, to hide, it was his cavea, his cave, his hiding place. Thus all names were originally predicative roots. They predicated some general quality or attribute of some particular thing. And hence their exceeding fruitfulness, being general terms which, by the flexible operations of the human mind, were capable of being applied to any object where it could discern the same, or a kindred, or an analogous quality.

We thus track language up to its last hiding place. It is the immediate, natural, instinctive product of man's physical and rational organism - it is an invariable and inseparable concomitant of his rational faculties and processes. It consists of general or predicative roots, expressing some generic idea, and applied to a specific object, by the aid of demonstrative roots, which specialize and localize them. "These roots," says Prof. Müller, "consist of plastic types, produced by a power inherent in human nature. They exist, as Plato would say, by nature; though, with Plato, we should add that when we say by nature, we mean by the immediate hand of God. There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck, rings. Each substance has its peculiar ring. We can tell the more or less perfect struc ture of metals by their vibrations, by the answer which they give. It was the same with man, the most highly organized of nature's works. Man, in his primitive and perfect state,

was not only endowed, like the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoeia. He possessed likewise the faculty of giving more articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind. That faculty was not of his own making. It was an instinct, an instinct of the mind as irresistible as any other instinct."

On the theory here advanced we have no special criticism to offer. We have obviously passed the sphere of induction, and are in that of speculation. Whether the "ringing" doctrine be true, or whether, without it, speech was produced by a rational instinct, we shall not undertake to determine. We see no necessity of it; nor, perhaps, can any serious objection be urged against its assumption. When we have followed up the stream of speech thus far, we may well admit that it has some mysterious head-waters, which will never be unveiled to human view. One conclusion, we believe, follows irresistibly from the researches we have so imperfectly sketched. The first man was the archetypal man, at once enfolding all the germs, and exhibiting all the high attributes of the race. That man was not thrown out forlorn and miserable upon the wild; that he did not commence his career a mute, pitiable, savage troglodyte, and, through millions of ages, work his way up with his brain and his ten fingers, gradually inventing, as he went along, government, language, art, religion, until, after myriads of milleniums, he stood forth equipped in the rational and spiritual attributes of humanity; that he was created "very good," and at once assumed his indefeasible prerogative and dignity as made in the image of God, and lord of this lower creation, is the verdict alike of Scripture and of reason. Every form of the infidel assumption which makes man a transformed monkey, or a slowly tamed savage, is as gratuitous as it is degrading, and is spewed out of the mouth of genuine science.