Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/418

406 Languages and the Antiquity of Speaking Man. In this essay he maintained that the human race, when first endowed with articulate language, was necessarily of one community and one speech, and that the origin of the various linguistic stocks is due to a force which is in constant activity, and which may be styled "the language-making instinct of very young children." Many instances of languages thus spontaneously created by children were given; and in a later paper on the Development of Language, read before the Canadian Institute of Toronto, in 1888, as a sequel to the address, and published in the Journal of the Institute and afterward separately, further evidence was produced to show that the words and grammar of such languages might, and in many cases probably would, be totally different from those of the parental speech. In the original address the fact was pointed out that in the first peopling of every country, when, from various causes, families must often be scattered at wide distances from one another, many cases must have occurred where two or more young children of different sexes, left by the death of their parents to grow up secluded from all other society, were thus compelled to frame a language of their own, which would become the mother-tongue of a new linguistic stock. It is evident that, along with their new language, these children and their descendants would have to devise a new religion, a new social policy, and in general new modes of life, except in so far as reminiscences of the parental example and teachings might direct or modify the workings of their minds. All these conclusions, it is affirmed by Mr. Hale, in his Introduction to the Committee's Sixth Report to the British Association, "accord precisely with the results of ethnographical investigations in America."

He further maintained that while, according to the evidence adduced by geologists, we must believe that a being who had the form and some of the faculties of man (including probably some partly developed power of speech) existed in the Quaternary era, many thousands and perhaps many ten thousands of years ago, all the evidence points to the conclusion that social man, of the existing species, fully endowed with the human faculties, including that of articulate speech, appeared only some seven or eight thousand years back; and, further, that when "speaking man" thus appeared, his mental like his physical capacity—though, of course, not his knowledge—was fully equal to the capacity of any of his descendants.

The solution thus offered of the linguistic problem was received with more prompt and general favor than is usually accorded to novel theories. Prof. Abel Hovelacque, well known as one of the most eminent philologists and ethnologists of Europe, and now the official director of the School of