Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/48

 from a common ancestral speech. Conscious personality and group-variations of character at different periods under different stress must have moulded into families our primitive speech, if the mind is its mother. In later times but very far back, the earlier tribal tongues split into branches and otherwise became modified.

The fact that words issue from anatomical locations clearly fixed in the gray matter of the brain, does not argue that the speech-areas originate the words. The origin of the word is the idea of which the word is, among other things, the symbol. That particular area of the brain which made it possible for us to utilize the symbols of our ideas became fit for the purpose, first, through gestural relationship with the motor-centers in the brain. More searching inquiry shows that in all right-handed persons the speech-center is localized in the left hemisphere of the brain; left-handed persons have it in the right. Stone implements made by early man demonstrate