Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/109

Rh person who is speaking to them, in order to get the exact sense of the words which they hear.

We mention here, without dwelling upon it, that the faculty of language stands in close relation with a certain one of the frontal convolutions of the brain, which the inferior monkeys do not possess and which is found in a rudimentary state in the anthropoids, but the full acquisition and most complete development of which have made man, what he is, the master of articulate speech.

We thus perceive that the study of language belongs to the domain of the natural sciences. The objections that have been made to this view have little force with us. The first of them is that language is not transmitted with the blood. This confounds the transmission of the art of speech with that of the faculty of language. The faculty is hereditarily transmitted; it is intimately related to the cerebral development, and goes down with the structure, nature, and qualities of the brain. As to the way in which the transmitted organ shall perform its functions, the parents of the child are there to stimulate and direct it, and to teach their offspring how to use the faculty it has inherited from them. We must not confound the faculty with the use that may be made of it. That use is an art, which the child acquires by tradition. But, we repeat, in the period of formation of a language, sonorous expression is only the more intense formulation of an emotion, usually associated with mimicry, the general attitude and face-play, a formulation which has the advantage of being more striking to strangers. In any case, it originally required to be complemented by gesture; and peoples little advanced in civilization may still be cited, among whom conversation is difficult in the dark, where mimicry can not be brought in to aid it. Bon wick relates that the Tasmanians had to recur to gestures and signs to establish the exact sense of their words; and Spix and Martins say the same of some of the savages of South America, and Cranz of the Greenlanders. These observations are far from being the only ones that have been made to the same effect.

A sound reason for including the study of language among the natural sciences lies in the fact that no man or group of men is competent arbitrarily to change the structure of its language. Fashion may sometimes admit particular words or banish others, but that has nothing to do with the structure. The morphological evolution of language defies all convention, all encroachment; it goes on by virtue of its own force, more or less slowly or speedily, but without the fancy or the pleasure of men having any power to divert it from its course. In short, we must avoid confounding changes in the vocabulary with linguistic, or, as we might call them, morphological changes. Among some Polynesian peoples, words are sometimes abolished; they will cease, for example, to employ in conversation the syllables that occur in the name of a chief; some people of the Bantu race will not