used by him to indicate all the objects he wanted.

The first word he learned was "apple" and for a time apple was the only
word he knew. At first he learned only the names of particular objects.
He did not seem able to learn words with an abstract or general
significance. But although he was reduced to a state of mental infancy,
his "intelligence" remained, and he learned with astonishing rapidity.
"His faculty of judgment, his power of reasoning, were as sound and
vigorous as ever," continues the report. "The content of knowledge
seemed to have been lost, but the form of knowledge remained as active
as before the accident and was perhaps even more precise and definite."

One reason why man is superior to the brutes is probably that he has a
better natural memory. Another reason is that there are more things that
he can do, and so he has an opportunity to gain a wider and more varied
experience. Consider what a man can do with his hands! To this he has
added tools and machinery, which are an extension of the hand and have
multiplied its powers enormously. It is now pretty well agreed, however,
that the chief advantage which mankind has over the brutes is in the
possession of speech by which he can communicate his ideas. In
comparatively recent times he has supplemented this means of
communication by the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and
the telephone. In this way he has been able not only to communicate his
experiences but to fund and transmit them from one generation to
another.

As soon as man began to point out objects and associate them with vocal
sounds, he had obtained possession of a symbol by which he was able to
deliberately communicate his desires and his intentions to other men in
a more precise and definite way than he had been able to do through the
medium of spontaneous emotional expression.

The first words, we may suppose, were onomatopoetic, that is to say,
vocal imitations of the objects to which they referred. At any rate they
arose spontaneously in connection with the situation that inspired them.
They were then imitated by others and thus became the common and
permanent possession of the group. Language thus assumed for the group
the role of perception in the individual. It became the sign and symbol
of those meanings which were the common possession of the group.

As the number of such symbols was relatively small in comparison to the
number of ideas, words inevitably came