Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/424

402 natural protective covering of hair or wool, capable of adapting itself to the variety of the seasons: every human being is born into the world naked and cringing, needing protection against exposure and defence from shame. Gifted is man, accordingly, with all the ingenuity which he requires in order to provide for this need, and placed in the midst of objects calculated to answer to his requirements, suitable materials for his ingenuity to work upon ready to his hand. And hence, it is hardly less distinctively characteristic of man to be clad than to speak; nor is any other animal so universally housed as he. Clothing began with the simplest natural productions, with leaves and bark, with skins of wild animals, and the like; as shelter with a cave, a hole in the ground, the hollow of a tree, a nest of interwoven branches. But ingenuity and taste, with methods perfected and handed down from generation to generation, made themselves, more and more, ministers to higher and less simple needs; the craving after comfort, ease, variety, grace, beauty, sought satisfaction; and architecture by degrees became an art, and dress-making a handicraft, each surrounded by a crowd of auxiliary arts and handicrafts, giving occupation to no insignificant part of the human race, calling into action some of its noblest endowments, and bringing forth forms of elegance and beauty—embodiments of conceptions, realizations of ideals, produced by long ages of cultivation, and capable neither of being conceived nor realized until after a protracted course of training. So was it also with language. Man was not created with a mere gamut of instinctive cries, nor yet with a song like the bird's, as the highest expression of his love and enjoyment of life: he had wants, and capacities of indefinite improvement, which could be satisfied and developed only through means of speech; nor was he treated by nature with a disappointing and baffling niggardliness in respect to them; he was furnished also with organs of speech, and the power to apply their products to use in the formation of language. His first beginnings were rude and insufficient, but the consenting labour of generations has perfected them, till human thought has been clothed in garments measurably worthy of it, and an edifice of speech has