Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/465

XII.] lies too far back in our lives to be reached by our memories; we feel as if we had always spoken, as directly and naturally as we have thought. As a race, too, we have done the same thing: neither history nor tradition can penetrate to a period at all approaching that of the formation of language; it was in the very childhood of our species, and men learned thinking and talking together, even as they learn them now-a-days: not till they had acquired through language the art of wielding the forces of thought, were they qualified to go on to the storing up of various knowledge. Into a few years of instruction are now crowded, for the young student, the net results of as many tens of centuries of toiling after wisdom on the part of no small portion of mankind; and, in like manner, into the language-learning of the first few months and years is crowded the fruit of as many ages of language-making. We saw in the last lecture  that, if two human beings were suffered to grow up together untaught, they would inevitably frame some means of communication, to which we could not deny the name of language: but we know not how many generations would succeed one another before it could reach a fulness comparable with that of even the rudest existing human dialects. Men invent language, their mental instrument, as truly as they invent the mechanical appliances whereby they extend and multiply the power of their hands; but it would be as impossible for a man, or a generation, to invent a language like one of those which we know and use, as, for example, to invent a locomotive engine. The invention of the engine may be said to have begun when the first men learned how to make a fire and keep it alive with fuel; another early step (and one to which many a living race has not even yet ascended) was the contriving of a wheel; command was won, by degrees, of the other mechanical powers, at first in their simplest, then in their more complicated, forms and applications; the metals were discovered, and the means of reducing and working them one after another devised, and improved and perfected by long accumulated experience; various motive powers were noted and reduced to the service of men; to the list of such, it was at length seen that steam might be added, and, after many vain