Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/188

176 do it too? Because the animal does not, and the child does speak. The child speaks whenever it gives utterance to its desire or feeling. The dog does not speak, when, knowing that he deserves correction, he comes up, timidly and abjectly, to cringe at the feet of his master. It is voluntarily, that is, after having found out the how and the why, that the child has associated certain movements of the larynx with certain ideas. But you can not teach a dog to come up for correction gamboling and wagging his tail.

The deaf-mute comprehends and speaks to himself in reading writing. He speaks to you when he writes to you, because the voluntary and trained movement of his eyes or fingers has put on for him a precise signification. The parrot would be speaking if he said, "Let us have breakfast" whenever he wanted to eat; but he does not speak when he amuses himself by hailing every visitor with these words.

To return to Sir John Lubbock's dog, he speaks when he goes deliberately to look for the card which corresponds with his desire; we might perhaps say that he reads, for he distinguishes it among the others. Only, the sign might be a triangle or a square, a round figure or a dart; the result would be the same, and would have no bearing. Sir John's idea of phonetic writing has an air of whimsicality; and I am inclined to believe it must have been sportive, and that the secret of the matter lay in the simplification of the figure of which the dog had to grasp the meaning.

The question now arises whether we can hope to go much further with the animal. It is one of the most important questions in the discussion. After all, if the transformist doctrine is true, and there was an ancestor of man that did not know how to speak, and man has had to learn to speak, why may not the dog do the same? Professor P. J. Van Beneden, of the University of Louvain, had, and may still have, a dog which could accompany with his voice a tolerably complicated air played on the piano. My dog Marquis could sing in unison an air of "La Favorita" when a contralto friend gave him the keynote. Could we not get him to give some signification to his vowels? Possibly, but it would be a very hard task, for these reasons:

We speak and we write and read with the eyes. The blind man reads with his fingers and writes; the deaf-mute reads with his eyes, and he writes and even speaks without hearing. Language, under whatever form it is manifested, consists essentially of a series of voluntary and conscious movements, at least in the beginning (I mean reading with the eyes), to which we attach a certain meaning. These movements are of the most various and complicated character. The organs which produce them are either the vocal apparatus, exceedingly mobile and susceptible of assuming a great variety of figures, which includes the larynx, glottis, palate, cheeks, tongue, teeth, lips, and nose, or the fingers placed at the end of the arms, capable of various movements, or the eyes. The dog has neither our larynx nor