en, strangest and worst of all, intellect is entirely resolved into
talking! There can be no intellect but it must talk, and all talking
must be intellectual. I believe people do sometimes talk without
understanding; and I think the world would fare ill if they never
understood without talking. The intellect is an entirely silent faculty,
and has nothing to do with parts of speech any more than the moral part
has. A man may feel and know things without expressing either the
feeling or knowledge; and the talking is a _muscular_ mode of
communicating the workings of the intellect or heart--muscular, whether
it be by tongue or by sign, or by carving or writing, or by expression
of feature; so that to divide a man into muscular and talking parts, is
to divide him into body in general, and tongue in particular, the
endless confusion resulting from which arrangement is only less
marvellous in itself, than the resolution with which Mr. Fergusson has
worked through it, and in spite of it, up to some very interesting and
suggestive truths; although starting with a division of humanity which
does not in the least raise it above the brute, for a rattlesnake has
his muscular, aesthetic, and talking part as much as man, only he talks
with his tail, and says, "I am angry with you, and should like to bite
you," more laconically and effectively than any phonetic biped could,
were he so minded. And, in fact, the real difference between the brute
and man is not so much that the one has fewer means of expression than
the other, as that it has fewer thoughts to express, and that we do not
understand its expressions. Animals can talk to one another intelligibly
enough when they have anything to say, and their captains have words of
command just as clear as ours, and better obeyed. We have indeed, in
watching the efforts of an intelligent animal to talk to a human being,
a melancholy sense of its dumbness; but the fault is still in its
intelligence, more than in its tongue. It has not wit enough to
systematise its cries or signs, and form them into language.

But there is no end to the fallacies and confusions of Mr. Fergusson's
arrangement. It is a perfect entanglement of gun-cotton, and explodes
into vacuity wherever one holds a light to it. I shall leave him to do
so with the rest of it for himself, and should perhaps have left it to
his own handling altogether, but for the intemperateness of the spirit
with which he has spoken on a subjec