mals or indications of
danger, could often be easily represented by imitative sounds: the need
for food and the like could be indicated by gesture and natural cries.
Both sources are verae causae; to them Noire, supported by Max Muller,
has added another which has sometimes been called the Yo-heave-ho
theory. Noire contends that the real crux in the early stages of
language is for primitive man to make other primitive men understand
what he means. The vocal signs which commend themselves to one may not
have occurred to another, and may therefore be unintelligible. It may be
admitted that this difficulty exists, but it is not insuperable. The
old story of the European in China who, sitting down to a meal and being
doubtful what the meat in the dish might be, addressed an interrogative
Quack-quack? to the waiter and was promptly answered by Bow-wow,
illustrates a simple situation where mutual understanding was easy.
But obviously many situations would be more complex than this, and to
grapple with them Noire has introduced his theory of communal action.
"It was common effort directed to a common object, it was the most
primitive (uralteste) labour of our ancestors, from which sprang
language and the life of reason." (Noire "Der Ursprung der Sprache",
page 331, Mainz, 1877.) As illustrations of such common effort he cites
battle cries, the rescue of a ship running on shore (a situation not
likely to occur very early in the history of man), and others. Like Max
Muller he holds that language is the utterance and the organ of thought
for mankind, the one characteristic which separates man from the
brute. "In common action the word was first produced; for long it was
inseparably connected with action; through long-continued connection it
gradually became the firm, intelligible symbol of action, and then in
its development indicated also things of the external world in so far
as the action affected them and finally the sound began to enter into a
connexion with them also." (Op. cit. page 339.) In so far as this theory
recognises language as a social institution it is undoubtedly correct.
Darwin some years before Noire had pointed to the same social origin
of language in the fourth chapter of his work on "The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals". "Naturalists have remarked, I believe with
truth, that social animals, from habitually using their vocal organs
as a means of intercommunication, use them on other occasions muc