to be called "immaterial" or not is quite beside the question.

Our author's argumentation, it will be rightly inferred, is more or less rambling in character. Returning to the two propositions which really make up his argument, it is an obvious criticism that every sensible Darwinian will concede them both without a moment's hesitation. There is not the slightest evidence of the existence of a race of men destitute of articulate speech; and if apes or any other animals do possess the slightest trace of such an acquisition, it may safely be neglected on the principle of de minimis non curat lex. It is only Dr. Bateman's imaginary Darwinian who finds it difficult to admit these plain facts. The actual supporters of this "dangerous heresy" have never gone out of their way to detect an historical substratum for Reynard or Æsop, or to hunt from its obscurity the Leibnitzian story of the Latin-speaking dog; there are some of them, we fear, who would even, on general grounds, cast discredit on the story of Balaam. But if this be really the Darwinian state of mind, then Dr. Bateman's work is plainly a case

1 Neglected, or conceded, by the controversialist, I mean: to the disinterested student of nature no fact, however small, is really trivial.

of ignoratio elenchi, or what is otherwise called "barking up the wrong tree."

As regards the process, psychological and physiological, by which the faculty of articulate speech was acquired by mankind, no thorough explanation has yet been offered, either upon the Darwinian or upon any other theory. The so-called "bow-wow" or onomatopoetic theory is no doubt correct, so far as it goes, as a description of facts which have attended the acquisition of speech; but it hardly goes to the root of the matter. The power of enunciating sounds so as to communicate ideas and feelings is certainly an art, as much as the later acquired powers of writing or drawing. For the original acquisition of such an art two conditions were requisite-the physiological capacity of the vocal organs for producing articulate sounds, and the psychological capacity of abstraction implied in the conception of a sign or symbol. There must also have been required-as underlying the lastnamed capacity-the possession of a certain amount of mental flexibility, or inventiveness, or capability of framing new combinations of ideas. This sort of mental flexibility is found among animals in man alone, and in his case it is the accompaniment, and probably the result, of an exceptionally long period of infancy. The significance of infancy, psychologi

cally, is that it is a period during which a great number of all-important nervous combinations are formed after birth under the influence of outward circumstances which slightly vary from generation to generation. Where there is no infancy, all the most important nervous combinations are established before birth, and under the unmodified influence of the powerful conservative tendency of heredity. Where there is an infancy, many important nervous combinations are not formed until after birth, and the strictly conservative tendency of heredity is liable to be modified by the fact that the experience of the offspring amid environing circumstances is not likely to be precisely the same as that of the parent. The prolongation of infancy, therefore, increases the opportunities for the production of a mental type more plastic than that which is witnessed in the lower animals; it paves the way for inventiveness and for progress. It is, furthermore, the increased variety of experience resulting from this increased mental plasticity that leads to the power of abstraction and generalisation—the power of marking out and isolating in thought the element that is common to different groups of phenomena.

Now, in the first employment of articulated words by inchoate man, who had hitherto only grunted or howled, the main point to be interpreted psychologi

cally is the inventive turn of mind which could establish an association between a number of vocal sounds and a corresponding number of objects, and which could appreciate the utility of such an association in facilitating concerted action with one's fellow-creatures; though, as to the last point, the utility would be so enormous that the maintenance of the device, when once conceived, could never be in doubt. In the origination of language it is but the first costly step that requires consideration; but this step obviously involved no superhuman mystery. It was but an instance—though the greatest of all in its consequences of that general psychical plasticity which characterises the only animal which begins life with a considerable proportion of its nervous combinations undetermined.

It is not pretended that such considerations solve the problem of the origin of speech. They nevertheless go far toward putting it into its proper position, and indicating the class of inquiries with which it must be grouped if it is to be treated in that broad philosophical way which can alone

connect its solution with the fortunes of the Dar

winian theory. The existence of language is not, as Max Müller's dicta imply, a fact in the universe that is isolated or sui generis in being incapable of

scientific explanation.

Immense as the fabric of

human speech has grown to be, it is undoubtedly based on sundry acts of discovery or invention-not necessarily very conspicuous at the outset among primeval semi-human savages. The inventive acts which led to the systematic use of vocal sounds for the interchange of ideas, like the inventive acts which resulted in bows and arrows and in cookery, are to be regarded simply as instances of the general increase in psychical plasticity which has been the fundamental fact in the genesis of man intellectually. In other words, the existence of language is a fact no more wonderful than the general superiority of human over simian intelligence; and when it shall have been shown how the rigid mind of an ape might acquire plasticity, the problem of the origin of language, along with many other problems, will have been, ipso facto, more than half solved.

A great step in this direction was taken by Mr. Wallace, when he pointed out that when variations in intelligence have become, on the whole, more useful to a race of animals than variations in physical constitution, then natural selection must seize upon the former to the relative neglect of the latter. This conclusion follows inevitably from the theory of natural selection as conceived by Mr. Darwin; and it further