Chapter XIII: Man's Relation to the Spiritual 225 (3)

James Forbes, in his "Oriental Memoirs," relates a striking instance of this kind. One of a shooting party had killed a female monkey in a banian tree, and carried it to his tent. Forty or fifty of the tribe soon gathered around the tent, chattering furiously and threatening an attack, from which they were only diverted by the display of the fowling-piece, whose effects they seemed perfectly to understand. But while the others retreated, the leader of the troop stood his ground, continuing his threatening chatter. Finding this of no avail, he came to the door of the tent, moaning sadly, and by his gestures seeming to beg for the dead body. When it was given, he took it sorrowfully up in his arms and carried it away to the waiting troop. That hunter never shot a monkey again.

This deep feeling for the dead is probably not common among monkeys. The gibbon, for instance, is said to take no notice of the dead. It is, however, highly sympathetic to injured and sick companions, and this feeling seems common to all the apes. No human being could show more tender care of wounded or helpless companions than has often been seen in members of this affectionate tribe of animals.

Without giving further examples of the intelligence and sympathy of the apes, we may say that they possess in a marked degree the mental powers to which man owes so much, viz. observation and imitation. The ape is the most curious of the lower animals--that is, it possesses the faculty of observation in an unusual degree. What we call curiosity in the ape is the basic form of the characteristic which we call attention or observation in man. Its seeming great activity in the ape is what might naturally be expected in an observant animal when removed from its natural habitat to a location where all around it is new and strange. Man under like circumstances is as curious as the ape, while the latter in its native trees probably finds little to excite its special attention. In both man and the ape it needs novelty to excite curiosity.

Again, the ape is imitative in a high degree. This faculty also it does not share with the lower animals, but does with man, imitation being one of the methods by which he has attained his supremacy. Observation, imitation, education, are the three levers in the development of the human intellect. The first two of these the ape possesses in a marked degree. It is susceptible also to the last, being very teachable. Education certainly exists to some extent among the apes in their natural habitat, perhaps to as great an extent as it did in primitive man. In the latter case it is doubtful if there was much that could be called designed education, the young gaining their degree of knowledge by observing and imitating their elders. The same is certainly the case among the apes.

We may reasonably ask what there is in the life and character of the apes to give them this mental superiority over the remaining lower animals. It is certainly not due to the arboreal life and powers of grasp of these animals, for in those respects they resemble the lemurs, which are greatly lacking in intelligence. Whether the monkeys emerged from the lemurs or the two groups developed side by side is a question as yet unsettled; at all events they are closely similar in conditions of existence. Yet while the monkeys are the most intelligent and teachable of animals, the lemurs are among the least intelligent of the mammalia. There is here a marked distinction which is evidently not due to difference of structure or habitat, and must have its origin in some other characteristic, such as difference in life habits.

There is certainly nothing in the diet of the ape to develop intelligence. The frugivorous and herbivorous animals do not need cunning and shrewdness to anything like the extent necessary in carnivorous animals. They do not need to pursue or lie in wait for prey; and they escape from their enemies mainly through strength, speed, concealment, or other physical powers or methods. Escape may occasionally develop mental alertness, but does not usually do so. Certainly if the alert, watchful, suspicious habits of the apes are due to the requisite of avoiding dangerous enemies, we might naturally look for similar habits in the lemurs, which are similarly situated. And if we consider the wide distribution of the apes throughout the tropics of both hemispheres, and their great diversity in species and condition, it seems very unlikely that in all these localities their relations with other animals would be such as to develop the mental alertness which they so generally display. The fact appears to be that, while this may be a cause, it is not a leading cause, of mental development in animals, and that we must seek elsewhere for the origin of animal intelligence.

Research, indeed, leads us to examples of intelligence where we should least expect to find it. Among the mammalia we perceive one marked example in the beavers, the only one in the great class of the rodents, with their nine hundred or more of species. But we must go still lower, to the insects, for the most striking examples, finding them alone in the ants, the bees, and the termites, among the vast multitude of insect forms. Less marked instances appear in the elephants, in some of the birds, and in certain other gregarious animals.

From these examples, and what is elsewhere known of animal intelligence, one broad conclusion may be drawn, that all the strikingly intelligent animals are strongly social in their habits, and that no decided display of intelligence is to be found among solitary species. This conclusion becomes almost a demonstration in the case of the ants and bees. The ants, for instance, comprise hundreds of species, spread over most of the world, mainly social, but occasionally solitary. The social species, while varying greatly in habit, all display powers of intelligence, and these so diversified as to indicate many separate lines of evolution. The solitary ants, on the contrary, manifest no special intelligence, and do not rise above the general insect level. The same may be said of the bees. The hive bee, the most communal in habit, shows the highest traits of intelligent activity. The bees which form smaller groups and the social wasps stand at a lower level, and the solitary bees and wasps sink to the ordinary insect plane. We arrive at like conclusions from observation of the social termites, or white ants, some species of which are remarkable for their intelligent cooeperation and division of duties.

Examples similar in kind may be drawn from the vertebrates. Among the birds there are none more quick-witted than the social crows, none with less display of intelligence than the solitary carnivorous species. Birds are rather gregarious than social. There are few species whose association is above that of mere aggregation in flight. Those more distinctively social usually have special habits which indicate intelligence--as in the often cited instances of their seemingly trying and executing delinquents. Among the carnivorous mammals the social dog or wolf tribe displays the intelligent habit of mutual aid. The horses, oxen, deer, and other gregarious hoofed animals have a degree of division of duties, but their intelligence is of a lower grade than that of the dogs and the elephants. On the whole, it may be affirmed that the social habit is frequently accompanied by instances of special intelligence to which we find no counterpart among the solitary forms, and that the highest manifestations of intelligence in the lower animals are found in those forms which possess communal habits, as the ants, bees, termites, and beavers.

One important characteristic of the communal animals is that they become mentally specialized. They round up their powers, build barriers of habit over which they cannot pass, perform the same acts with such interminable iteration that what began as intellect sinks back into instinct. Each individual has fixed duties and is confined within a limited circle of acts, whose scope it cannot pass, or only to the minutest extent.

The non-communal social animals, on the contrary, are not thus restricted. Their intelligence is of a generalized character, and is capable of developing in new channels. None are tied down to special duties, each possesses the full powers of all, and they are thus more open to a continued growth of the intellect than the communal forms. To this class belongs the ape. Its intelligence is general, not special; broadly capable of development, not narrowed and bound in by the limitation of certain fixed and special duties.

The suggestions above offered point to three grades of community among animals, which may be designated the communal, the social, and the solitary. Among these there are, of course, many stages of transition from one to the other. The specially communal, including the ants, bees, termites, and beavers, are those in which there is almost a total loss of individuality, each member working for the good of the community as a unit, not for its personal advantage. The result consists in organized industries, division and specialization of duties, a common home, food stock, etc. At a lower level in animal life, that of the hydroid polyps, communism has become so complete that the community has grown into an actual individual, the members not being free, but acting as organs of an aggregate mass, in which each performs some special duty for the good of the community.

The social animals differ from the communal in that the individuality of the members is fully preserved. There is some measure of work for the group, some degree of mutual aid, some evidence of leadership and subordination, but these are confined to a few exigencies of life, while in most of the details of existence each member of the group acts for itself. The solitary animals are those which do not form groups larger than that of the family, and into whose life the principle of mutual aid, outside the immediate family relations, does not enter. Each acts for itself alone, and intercourse between the individuals of the species is greatly restricted.

The advantages of social habits among animals are evident. There is excellent reason to believe that all animals, and especially such advanced forms as the vertebrates and the higher arthropods, have some power of mental development, some facility in devising new methods of action to meet new situations. Though their reasoning power may be small, it is not quite lacking, and many examples of the exercise of the faculty of thought could be cited if necessary.

What we are here concerned with, is the final result of such exercises of individual thought powers. In the case of the solitary forms, such new conceptions die with the individual. Though they may exert an influence on the development of the nervous system, and aid in the hereditary transmission of more active brain powers, they are lost as special ideas, fail to be taken up and repeated by other members of the species. This is not the case with the social animals. Each of these has some faculty of observation and some tendency to imitation, and useful steps of advance made by individuals are likely to be observed and retained as general habits of the community. Anything of importance that is gained may be preserved by educative influences. The facility of mental communication between these creatures is perhaps much greater than is generally supposed, and acts of importance which are not directly observed might in many cases be transmitted through repetition for the benefit of the group. We know this to be the main agency in human progress. New ideas are of rare occurrence with man. Ideas of permanent value do not occur to one per cent., perhaps not to one hundredth of one per cent., of civilized mankind, yet few of such ideas are lost, and that which has proved of advantage to an individual soon becomes the common possession of a community.

Among the lower animals new and advantageous ideas are probably of exceedingly rare occurrence. When they do occur, their advantage to solitary forms is very slight, being that of minute steps of brain development and hereditary transmission of the same. To social forms they are doubly advantageous, since, while they tend to brain development, they may also be preserved in their original form, and transmitted directly to members of the group. They are still more advantageous to the communal animals, from the closer intercourse of these, and their constant association in acts of mutual aid. But in the latter instance their influence is usually exerted for the benefit of the community as a unit, while in the case of social animals it is of advantage to the individual.

The result of such a process of evolution in the case of the communal animals is a strict specialism. A series of acts of advantage to the community are slowly developed, and are repeated so frequently that they become instinctive, while a fixed circle of duties arises, through whose links it is almost impossible to break. There is no reason to believe that the individual initiative is wanting. The varied round of duties of a community of ants, for instance, could only have arisen through step after step of progress from the condition of the solitary ants. If such steps have been made, others may be made, and are likely to be preserved if found advantageous. The ant individual preserves its powers of observation and thought and may initiate new processes. But most of the ant communities are already so excellently adapted to the conditions of their life as to leave little opportunity for improvement, so that the adoption of new and advantageous habits are certain to be exceedingly rare.

It is an interesting fact that communalism has been confined to animals of comparatively low organization. The most complete examples of it exist in the polyps and some other low forms, in which each community has become a compound individual, the members remaining attached to the parent stock. The next higher examples to be met are the frequently cited ants and bees, belonging to the lowly organized class of arthropoda, yet, through the advantage of association and mutual aid, developing actions and habits only found elsewhere in the human race. The only example among vertebrates is that of the beavers, members of the low order of rodents. With these the results are less varied and intricate than with the ants, in accordance with the much smaller size of the community. All the higher vertebrates are either social or solitary in habit, and among them the narrow specialism of the communal forms does not exist. Each individual works in large measure for itself, its mental powers remain generalized, and it is not tied down to the performance of a series of fixed hereditary acts from which escape is well-nigh impossible.

Of the social animals, man presents the most complete type, and the one from which we can best deduce the conditions of the class. A human community is made up of individuals of many degrees of intellectual ability, the mass remaining at a low level, the few attaining a high level. Yet those of high powers of intellect set the standard for the whole, teach the lower either by precept or example, and aid effectively in advancing the standard of the community. A rope or chain is said to be as weak as its weakest part. A human community, on the contrary, may be said to be as strong as its strongest part. The standing of the whole is dependent upon the thoughts and acts of the few, from whom the general mass receive new ideas and gain new habits. The existing intellectual and industrial position of mankind is very largely a result of ideas evolved by individuals age after age, and preserved as the mental property of the whole. Destroy the books and works of art and industry of any community, cut off its intellectual leaders, remove from the general mind the results of education, and it would at once fall back to a low level and be obliged to begin again its slow climb upward. The intellectual standing of any civilized nation depends upon two things: the preservation in books, in memory, and in works of art and industry, of the ideas of ancient workers and thinkers; and the mental activity of living thinkers and inventors, whose work takes its start from this standpoint of stored-up thought. Rob any community of all its basic ideas, and it would quickly retrograde to a primitive condition of thought and organization, from which it might need many centuries to emerge.

It has been said above that man is the highest example of the social animal. While that is the truth, it is not the whole truth. He is at the same time the highest example of the communal animal. Mutual aid, organization into strictly rounded communities, labor for the good of the whole, is as declared in him as in the most developed community of the ants, and we admire the work of the latter simply because they repeat at a lower level the work of man. In truth, in man we have a splendid example of the existence of the individual initiative in connection with the communal organization. Specialism exists in a hundred forms. Some nations have been tied down by it to conditions almost as fixed as those of the ants. But generalism exists in as full a measure, new ideas are constantly modifying or replacing the old, and the communism of man is a progressive one, steadily borne upward on the wings of new ideas. Individual thought has the fullest swing, and it is to the system of special reward for useful thought and act that man owes much of his great advance. On the other hand, reward without useful service has been one of the leading agencies that have acted to check human progress.

The lower animals do not possess the advantage of man in his power of preserving the thoughts and products of the past as a foundation for new steps of progress. Memory may aid them to a slight degree, but they have no special means of recording useful ideas. This cannot fairly be said of the communal forms, which possess the result of the labors of former generations as useful object lessons. But in the higher animals no means exist for the permanent preservation of ideas, and each step of progress must be due to the direct influence of living individuals and the indirect result of natural selection.

This is one cause of the slow mental advance of the lower animals. A second is the deficiency in educational influences, which have had so much to do with human progress. Education is not quite wanting in the brute creation. There are many instances on record of instruction given by the adults to the young. But this agency is in its embryo stage, and its influence must be small. Again, each tribe of lower animals is apt to fall into a fixed circle of life acts, to become so closely adapted to some situation or condition that any change of habits would be likely to prove detrimental. This is a state of affairs tending to produce stagnation and vigorously to check advance. Many instances of this could be cited from human history, while it is the common condition with the animals below man.

To return to the apes, the considerations above taken lead to the conclusion that it is chiefly, if not solely, to their social habits that they owe their mental quickness. While only in minor traits communal, they are eminently social, and have doubtless derived great advantage from this. The lemurs, which share their habitat and resemble them in organization, are markedly unsocial, and are as mentally dull as the apes are mentally quick. Possibly, the thought powers of the apes once set in train, there may have been something in the exigencies of arboreal life that quickened their powers of observation; but we are constrained to believe that the main influence to which they owe their development is that of social habits, in which they stand at a high, if not the highest, level among the distinctly social animals.

The thought capacities of the ape intellect are general, not special. The mind of these animals remains free and capable of new thought in new situations. It is fully alive to the needs and dangers of arboreal life, and advances no farther in its native habitat because there is nothing more of importance to be learned. But while fixed it is not stagnant. When the ape is taken from its native woods and put among the many new conditions arising on shipboard and in human habitations, we quickly perceive indications of its mental alertness. Its faculties of observation and imitation are actively exercised, and new habits and conceptions are quickly gained. Could the apes be made to breed freely in captivity, so that a domestic race, comparable to that of the dogs, could be obtained, their mental powers might, perhaps, be cultivated to an extraordinary degree, yielding instances of thought approaching that of man. The ape is especially notable for its tendency to attempt new acts of itself, not waiting to be taught, as in the case of other domesticated animals. In short, it seems by all odds to be the animal best fitted mentally to serve as the basis of a high intellectual development, as it is the best fitted physically to change from the attitude of the quadruped to that of the biped.

The anthropoid apes in general manifest a reversion from the social toward the solitary state, this condition reaching its ultimate in the orang, which is one of the most solitary of animals. The smaller forms are the most social, the gibbons being decidedly so. There is very good reason to believe that the man-ape was highly social, if we may judge from what we find in all races of men, and all grades, from the savage to the civilized. This animal was thus in a position to avail itself of all the advantages of the social habit, and to gain the mental development thence arising. How long ago it was when it left the trees and made its home upon the ground, it is impossible to say. It may have been as far back as the early Pliocene or the late Miocene Period, or even earlier. As yet its brain was probably no more developed than in the case of the other anthropoids, perhaps less so than in the existing species. But in its new habitat it was exposed to a series of novel conditions that must have exerted a healthful and stimulating influence upon its mind.

If it had remained in the trees we should probably to-day have only a man-ape still. Leaving their safe shelter for the ground, it became exposed to new dangers and was forced to fit itself to fresh conditions. Prowling carnivorous animals haunted its new place of residence, and these it had to avoid by speed or alertness of motion, or combat them by strength and the use of weapons. The carnivorous tastes which it had in all probability gained, made it a creature of the chase, pursuing swift animals, capturing them by fleetness or stratagem, or bringing them down with the aid of clubs and missiles. Such a new series of duties and dangers could not fail to exert a vigorous influence upon a brain already quick of thought and susceptible to fresh impressions, and we may well conceive that the man-ape then entered upon a new and rapid phase of mental progress, its brain developing in powers and growing in dimensions as it slowly became adapted to its new situation and grew able to cope with fresh demands and critical exigencies.

There is still another influence which has had its share, perhaps a very prominent share, in the intellectual development of animals, yet which no writer seems to have considered from this point of view. The probable effect of this influence needs to be taken into account, in conclusion of this section of our subject. It is that of the comparative agency of the senses in the development of the mind, and the effects likely to arise from the dominance of some one of the senses.

In the lowest animals touch was the predominant, if not the only sense, taste perhaps being associated with it. But these senses, which demand actual contact with objects, obviously could give none but the narrowest conception of the conditions of nature. The other senses, sight, hearing, and smell, give intimations of the existence and conditions of more or less distant objects, and their development greatly widened the scope of outreach in animals and must have exerted a powerful influence upon the growth of mental conditions.

It need scarcely be said that the sense which gives the fullest and most extended information about existing things is necessarily the one that acts most effectively upon the mind, and that this sense is that of sight. Hearing and smell yield us information concerning certain local conditions of objects, but sight extends to the limits of the universe, while in regard to near objects it has the advantage of being practically instantaneous in action and much fuller in the information it conveys. Sight, therefore, is evidently the most important of the senses, so far as the broadening of the mental powers is concerned, and any animal in which it is predominant must possess a great advantage in this respect over those species controlled to any great degree by one of the lower senses.

It may be said here that sight only slowly gained dominance in animal life. Though the eye, as an organ of vision, is found at a low level in the animate scale, the indications are that it long played a subordinate part, and has gained its full prominence only in man. During long ages life was confined to the sea, hosts of beings dwelling in the semi-obscurity of the under waters, and great numbers at too great a depth for light to reach them. To vast multitudes of these sight was partly or completely useless. The same may be said of hearing, the under-water habitat being nearly or completely a soundless one. The only one of the higher senses likely to be of general use to these oceanic forms is that of smell, and it may be that their knowledge of distant objects was mainly gained through sensitiveness to odors.

Of invertebrate land animals the same must be said. The land mollusks and the great order of insects and other land arthropods only to a minor extent dwell in the open light. Very many species haunt the semi-obscurity of trees or groves, hide among the grasses, lurk under bark, sticks, and stones, or dwell through most of their lives underground. Hosts of others are nocturnal. To only a small percentage of insects can sight be of any great utility, while hearing seems also to be of slight importance. Smell is probably the principal sense through which these animals gain information of distant objects.

There is existing evidence that the sense of smell in some insects is remarkably acute. The imprisoned female of certain nocturnal species, for instance, will attract the males from a comparatively immense distance, under conditions in which neither sight nor hearing could have been brought into play. The emission of odors and acute sensibility to them is the only presumable agency at work in those instances. As regards the most intelligent of the insects, the ants and the termites, the former are largely subterranean, the latter not only subterranean, but blind. In the one case, sight can play only a minor part, in the other, it plays no part at all. Touch and smell seem to be the dominant senses in these animals, and the degree of intelligence they display shows of how high a development these senses are susceptible. Yet the intelligence arising from them must necessarily be local and limited in its application; it cannot yield the breadth of information and degree of mental development possible under the dominance of sight.

In the vertebrates we find a fully developed and broadly capable organ of vision, and it might be hastily assumed that in those animals sight is the dominant sense. But there are numerous facts which lead to a different conclusion. Many of the vertebrates are nocturnal, many dwell in obscure situations, many in the total darkness of caverns, underground tunnels and excavations, or the ocean's depths. To all these sight must be of secondary importance. Hearing also can be of no superior value, and the dominant sense must be that of smell. In the bats there would appear to be a remarkably acute power of touch, if we may judge from the facility with which they can avoid obstacles at full flight after their eyes have been removed.

It might, however, be supposed that in the higher land vertebrates sight is predominant, and that the diurnal mammals depend principally upon their eyes for their knowledge of nature. But there are facts which throw doubt upon this supposition. These facts are of two kinds, external and internal. That the quadrupeds, in general, are highly sensitive to odors is well known, and also that they trust very largely to the sense of smell. Hunters are abundantly aware of this, and have to be quite as careful to avoid being smelt by their game as to avoid being seen. We have abundant evidence of the remarkable acuteness of this sense in so high an animal as the dog, which can follow its prey for miles by scent alone, and can distinguish the odors, not only of different species, but of different individuals, being capable of following the trail of one person amid the tracks of numerous others.

The internal evidence of this fact is equally significant. In the vertebrates, in general, the olfactory lobe of the brain is largely developed, much exceeding in size the lobe of the optic nerve. It forms the anterior portion of the cerebrum, and in many instances constitutes a large section of that organ, being marked off from it by only a slight surface depression. If we can fairly judge, then, by anatomical evidence, the sense of smell plays a very prominent part in the life of all the lower vertebrates. If we take our domestic animals as an example, the olfactory lobe of the horse is considerably larger than that of man, though the brain, as a whole, is very much smaller, so that, comparatively, this organ constitutes a much larger portion of the total brain. The other domestic animals yield similar evidence of the great activity of the sense of smell.

While there is no doubt that sight is an active sense in all the higher quadrupeds, it evidently divides this activity with smell to a much greater degree than is the case with man, in whom smell plays a minor part, sight a major part, among the organs of sense.

This fact shows its effect in the comparative mental development of man and the lower animals. Man, depending so largely on vision, gains the broadest conception of the conditions of nature, with a consequent great expansion of the intellect. The quadrupeds, depending to a considerable degree upon smell for their conceptions of nature, are much narrower in their range of information and lower in their mental development. As regards the ape family, it occupies a position between man and the quadrupeds, and its intellectual activity may well be due in great measure to an increased trust in sight and a decreased trust in smell in gaining its conception of nature.

The question may arise, Why, if sight has this superiority over smell, did it not long since gain predominance, and relegate smell to a minor position? It may be answered that the superiority of sight is not complete. In one particular this sense is inferior to smell. The leading agency in the development of the sense organs of animals has been the struggle for existence, including escape from enemies, and the perception of food-animals or material. In these processes acuteness of smell plays a very important part. It has, moreover, the advantage of gathering information from all directions, while sight is very limited in its range. The eye is so subject to injury that its multiplication over the body would be rather disadvantageous than otherwise, while, localized as it is, a movement of the head is necessary to any breadth of vision, and the whole body must rotate to bring the complete horizon under observation. It seems evident, from these considerations, that sight is much inferior to smell in the timely perception of many forms of danger. Light comes in straight lines only, and a movement of the body is necessary to perceive perils lying outside these lines. Odors, on the contrary, spread in all directions, and make themselves manifest from the rear as well as the front.

In all probability this fact has had much to do with the continued dependence of animals on smell. In fishes and reptiles a full sweep of vision is so slowly gained that some more active sentinel sense is requisite to safety. In mammals the head rotates more easily, but valuable time is lost in the rotation of the whole body. These animals, therefore, depend on both sight and smell, in some cases equally, in some more fully on one or the other of these senses. When we reach the semi-upright ape, we have to do with a form capable of turning the body and observing the whole surrounding circle of objects more quickly and readily than any quadruped. As a result, these animals have grown to depend more fully on vision and less on smell than the quadrupeds. Finally, in fully erect man, the power of quick turning and alert observation of the whole circle of the horizon reaches its ultimate, and in man sight has become in a large degree the dominant sense, and smell has fallen to a minor place.

With this change in the relations of the senses has come a change in the degree of mental development. It is highly probable that the dependence of the apes on vision instead of smell has had much to do with their mental activity, quickness of observation, and active curiosity. In man there can be no question that it has played a great part in the rapid development of his intellectual powers, and in the extraordinary breadth of his conception of nature as compared with that of the lower animals. While hearing and smell advise us of neighboring conditions only, and have their chief utility as aids to the preservation of existence, sight makes us aware of the conditions of nature in remote localities, extending far beyond the limits of the earth. While this sense plays its part as one of the protective agencies, it is still more useful as an agent in the acquisition of knowledge in general, and has much to do with the development of the intellectual faculties. We may look, therefore, upon the increasing dominance of the sense of sight as a leading agency in the making of man as a thinking being, and may ascribe to this in a considerable measure the thirst for information and faculty of imitation so marked in the apes.

VII

THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

One of the characteristics of man, of which we spoke as among those to which his high development is due, is that of language. There is nothing that has had more to do with the mental progress of the human race than facility in the communication of thought, and in this vocal language is the principal agent and in the fullest measure is the instrument of the mind. Human speech has, in these modern times, become remarkably expressive, indicating all the conditions, relations, and qualities, not only of things, but of thoughts and ideal conceptions. And the utility of language has been enormously augmented by the development of the arts of writing and printing. Originally thought could only be communicated by word of mouth and transmitted by the aid of the memory. Now it can be recorded and kept indefinitely, so that no useful thought of able thinkers need be lost, but every valuable idea can be retained as an educative influence through unnumbered ages.

In this instrumentality, which has been of such extraordinary value to man, the lower animals are strikingly deficient. They are not quite devoid of vocal language, though it is doubtful if any of the sounds made by them have a much higher linguistic office than that of the interjection. But emotional sounds, to which these belong, are not destitute of value in conveying intelligence. They embrace cries of warning, appeals to affection, demands for help, calls for food supplies, threats, and other indications of passion, fear, or feeling. And the significance of these vocal sounds to animals may often be higher than we suppose. That is, they may not be limited to the vague character of the interjection, but may occasionally convey a specific meaning, indicative of some object or some action. In other words, they may advance from the interjection toward the noun or the verb, and approach in value the verbal root, a sound which embraces a complete proposition. Thus a cry of warning may be so modulated as to indicate to the hearer, "Beware, a lion is coming!" or to convey some other specific warning. We know that accent or tone plays a great part in Chinese speech, the most primitive of existing forms, a variation in tone quite changing the meaning of words. The same may be the case with the sounds uttered by animals to a much greater extent than we suppose.

We know this to be the case with some of the birds. The common fowl of our poultry yards has a variety of distinct calls, each understood by its mates, while special modulations of some call or cry are not uncommon among birds. The mammalia are not fluent in vocal powers, their range of tones being limited, yet they certainly convey definite information to one another. Recent observers have come to the conclusion that the apes do, to a certain extent, talk with one another. The experiments to prove this have not been very satisfactory, yet they seem to indicate that the woodland cries of the apes possess a certain range of definite meaning.

We are utterly ignorant of what powers of speech the man-ape possessed. It must, in its developed state as a land-dwelling, wandering, and hunting biped, have needed a wider range of utterance than during its arboreal residence. It was exposed to new dangers, new exigencies of life affected it, and its old cries very probably gained new meanings, or new cries were developed to meet new perils or conditions. In this way a few root words may have been gained, rising above the value of the interjection, and expressing some degree of definite meaning, though still at the bottom of the scale of language, the first stepping stones from the vague cry toward the significant word.

Between this stage and that of human language an immense gap supervenes, a broad abyss which it seems at first sight impossible to bridge. As the facts stand, however, it has been largely bridged by man himself. Side by side with the highly intricate languages which now exist, are various primitive forms of speech which take us far back toward the origin of human language. So advanced a people as the Chinese speak a language practically composed of root words, the higher forms of expression being attained by simple devices in the combination of these primitive word forms. The same may be said, in a measure, of ancient Egyptian speech. We can conceive of an early state of affairs in which these devices of word compounding were not yet employed, and in which each word existed as a separate expression, unmodified by association with any other word. Among the savage races of the earth very crude forms of language often exist, the methods of associating words into sentences being of the simplest character, though few surpass the Chinese in simplicity of system.

But all this represents an advanced stage of language evolution, a development of thought and its instrument which has taken thousands of years to complete. We cannot fairly judge from it what the speech of primitive man may have been, for in every case there has been a long process of development; aided, no doubt, in many cases, by educative influences acting from the more advanced upon the speech of the less advanced races.

If we seek to analyze any of these languages, the most intricate as well as the least advanced, we find ourselves in most instances able to isolate the root word as the basic element of speech. From this simple form all the more developed forms seem to have arisen. Take away their combining devices, and the root words fall apart like so many beads of speech, each with a defined significance of its own and fully capable of existing by itself. The Aryan and the Chinese especially offer themselves to this analytic method. Strip off the suffixes and affixes from Aryan words, get down to the germinal forms from which these words have grown, isolate these germs of speech, and we find ourselves in a language of root forms, each of which has grown vague and wide in significance as the modifying elements that limited its meaning have been removed. In the Chinese the problem is a much simpler one. We need simply to take the existing words out of their place in the sentence and let them stand alone, and we have root words at first hand. We may go through the whole range of human speech and, with more or less difficulty, arrive at a similar result. In short, the evidence seems conclusive that the language of mankind began in the use of isolated words of vague and broad significance, and that all the subsequent development of language consisted in the combination of these words, with a modification and limitation of their meaning, the families of speech differing principally in the method of combination devised.

It must, indeed, be said that in isolating the root forms of modern languages we reach conditions still far removed from those of primitive speech. These roots are in a measure packed with meaning. Time has added to their significance, and they lack the simplicity they probably once possessed. In particular, they have gained ideal senses, entered in a measure into that broad language of the mind which has been gradually added to the language of outer nature. The recognition of the existence of mind and thought doubtless came somewhat late in human development. Man long knew only his body and the world that surrounded it. Step by step only did he discover his mind. And when it became necessary to speak of mental conditions, no new language was invented, but old words were broadened to cover the new conditions. The mind is analogous to the body in its operations, ideas are analogues of things, and it was usually necessary only to add to the physical significance of words the corresponding ideal significance. In this way a secondary language slowly grew up, underlying and subtending the primary language, until the words invented to express the world of things were employed to include as vast a world of thoughts.

In getting down, then, to the language of primitive man we are obliged to divest the root forms of speech of all this ideal significance, and confine them to their physical meanings. In dealing with the languages of the least advanced existing tribes of mankind, indeed, little of this is requisite. The language of the mind with them has not yet begun its growth or is in its first simple stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from which they emerged.

It is to the ability to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes of speech. Thus a native of the Society Islands, while able to say "dog's tail," "sheep's tail," etc., has no separate word for tail. He cannot abstract the general term from its immediate relations. In the same way the uncivilized Malay has twenty different words to express striking with various objects, as with thick or thin wood, a club, the fist, the palm, etc., but he has no word for "striking" as an isolated thought. We find the same deficiency in the speech of the American Indians. A Cherokee, for instance, has no word for "washing," but can express the different kinds of washing by no less than thirteen distinct words.

All this indicates a primitive stage in the evolution of language, one in which every word had its immediate and local application, while in each word a whole story was told. The power of dividing thought into its separate elements was not yet possessed. As thought progressed men got from the idea of "dog" to that of "dog's tail." They could not think of the part without the whole. Then they reached a word for "dog's tail wags." But the idea of "wags" as an abstract motion was beyond their powers of thought. They could not think of action, but only of some object in action. The language of the American Indians was an immediate derivation from this mode of word formation, every proposition, however intricate it might be, constituting a single word, whose component parts could not be used separately. The mode of speech here indicated is one form of development of the root. Other forms are the compounding of the Chinese and the Mongolian and the inflection of the Aryan and the Semitic, all pointing directly back to the root form as their unit of growth.

The inference to be drawn from all this is that the language of primitive man consisted of isolated words, sounds which may originally have been mere cries or calls, but which gradually gained some definiteness of meaning, as signifying some of the varied conditions of the outer world. This is the conclusion to which philologists have now very generally come. The recognition that language consists of root words, variously modified and combined, leads back irresistibly to a period in which those roots had not yet begun to be modified and combined. The roots are the hard, persistent things in human speech. Grammatical expedients are the net in which these roots have been caught and confined. Free them from the net, and it falls to pieces, while the roots remain intact, the solid and persistent primitive germs of speech.

Yet in isolating root language as the basis of grammatical language we go far toward closing the gap between animal and human speech. It is still, doubtless, of considerable width, yet the distinction is no longer one of kind, but is simply one of degree. Primitive man had a much greater scope of language than is possessed by any of the lower animals, and the vocal sounds used had a clearer and more definite significance; but their nature was the same. They doubtless began in calls and cries like those in use by animals, and though these had increased in number and gained more distinct meanings, the difference in character was not great. In short, the analytic method employed by modern philologists has gone far to remove the supposed vast distinction between brute and human speech, and has traced back the language of man to a stage in which it is nearly related in character to the language of animals. The distinction has been brought down to one of degree, scarcely one of kind. A direct and simple process of evolution was alone needed to produce it, and through that evolution man undoubtedly passed in his progress upward from his ancestral stage.

The language of the lower animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems to have at first agreed with them. The infant begins its vocal utterances with simple cries; only at a later age does it begin to articulate. If we may judge from the development of language in the child, man began to speak with the use of sounds native to the vocal organs, and progressed by a process of imitation, endeavoring to reproduce the sounds heard around him: the voices of animals, the sounds of nature, etc. This tendency to imitate is not peculiar to man. It exists in many birds, and in some attains a marked development. The mocking bird, for instance, has an extraordinary flexibility of the vocal organs and power of imitating the voices of other birds. The parrot and some other birds go farther in this direction, being capable of using articulate language and clearly repeating words used by man.

None of the mammalia possess this facility. It is not found in the apes, and probably was not possessed by the ancestor of man. But it is not difficult to believe that in the efforts of the latter to gain a greater variety of vocal utterance, its organs of speech became more flexible, and in time it gained the power of articulation.

There are races of existing men whose powers of language seem still in the transition stage between articulate and inarticulate speech. This seems the case with the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa, whose vocal utterances consist largely of a series of peculiar clicks that are certainly not articulate speech, though on the road toward it. The Pygmies of the Central African forests seem similarly to occupy an intermediate position in the development of language. Those who have endeavored to talk with them speak of their utterance as being inarticulate in sound. It appears to be a sort of link between articulate and inarticulate speech. In short, the great abyss which was of old thought to lie between the languages of man and the lower animals has largely vanished through the labors of philologists, and we can trace stepping-stones over every portion of the wide gap. The language of man has not alone been evidently a product of evolution, but also one of development from the vocal utterances of the lower animals; and the man-ape, in its slow and long progress from brute into man, seems to have gradually developed that noble instrument of articulate speech which has had so much to do with subsequent human progress.

VIII

HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED