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XI.] how men should have come into possession of these humble rudiments of speech.

And our attention must evidently first be directed to the inquiry whether those same inventive and shaping powers of man which have proved themselves capable of creating out of monosyllabic barrenness the rich abundance of inflective speech were not also equal to the task of producing the first poor hoard of vocables. There are those who insist much on what they are pleased to term the divine origin of language; who think it in some way derogatory to the honour of the Creator to deny that he devised roots and words, and, by some miraculous and exceptional agency, put them ready-made into the mouths of the first human beings. Of such we would ask whether, after all, language can be in this sense only a divine gift to man; whether the hand of the Creator is any the less clearly to be seen, and need be any the less devoutly acknowledged, in its production, if we regard man himself as having been created with the necessary impulses and the necessary capacities for forming language, and then as having possessed himself of it through their natural and conscious workings. Language, articulate speech, is a universal and exclusive characteristic of man: no tribe of human kind, however low, ignorant, and brutish, fails to speak; no race of the lower animals, however highly endowed, is able to speak: clearly, it was just as much a part of the Creator's plan that we should talk as that we should breathe, should walk, should eat and drink. The only question is, whether we began to talk in the same manner as we began to breathe, as our blood began to circulate, by a process in which our own will had no part; or, as we move, eat, clothe and shelter ourselves, by the conscious exertion of our natural powers, by using our divinely-given faculties for the satisfaction of our divinely-implanted necessities.

That the latter supposition is fully sufficient to account for our possession of speech cannot with any show of reason be denied. Throughout its whole traceable history, language has been in the hands of those who have spoken it, for manifold modification, for enrichment, for adaptation to the varying ends of a varying knowledge and experience; nineteen