Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/68

58 dropping off again, leaving the word with its altered meaning, while if black is related to German blaken, to burn, and has the sense of "charred, burnt to a coal," and blanc has that of shining, a common origin may possibly he forthcoming for both sets among the family of words which includes blaze, fulgeo, flagro,, Sanskrit bhrâǵ), and so forth. But explanations of this kind have no hearing on the practical use of such words by mankind at large, who take what is given them and ask no questions. Indeed, however much such a notion may vex the souls of etymologists, there is a great deal to he said for the view that much of the accuracy of our modern languages is due to their having so far "lost consciousness" of the derivation of their words, which thus become like counters or algebraic symbols, good to represent just what they are set down to mean. Archæology is a very interesting and instructive study, but when it comes to exact argument, it may be that the distinctness of our apprehension of what a word means, is not always increased by a misty recollection hovering about it in our minds, that it or its family once meant something else. For such purposes, what is required is not so much a knowledge of etymology, as accurate definition, and the practice of checking words by realizing the things and actions they are used to denote.

It is as bearing on the question of the relation between idea and word that the study of the gesture-language is of particular interest. We have in it a method of human utterance independent of speech, and carried on through a different medium, in which, as has been said, the connection between idea and sign has hardly ever been broken, or even lost sight of for a moment. The gesture-language is in fact a system of utterance to which the description of the primæval language in the Chinese myth may be applied; "Suy-jin first gave names to plants and animals, and these names were so expressive, that by the name of a thing it was known what it was."

To speak first of the comparison of gesture-signs with words,