the real bearings of our problem, if
philosophers appeal to the fact that children are born without
language, and gradually emerge from mutism to the full command of
articulate speech.... Children, in learning to speak, do not invent
language. Language is there ready made for them. It has been there
for thousands of years. They acquire the use of a language, and, as
they grow up, they may acquire the use of a second and a third. It
is useless to inquire whether infants, left to themselves, would
invent a language.... All we know for certain is, that an English
child, if left to itself, would never begin to speak English, and
that history supplies no instance of any language having thus been
invented....

'Speech is a specific faculty of man. It distinguishes man from all
other creatures; and if we wish to acquire more definite ideas as
to the real nature of human speech, all we can do is to compare man
with those animals that seem to come nearest to him, and thus to
try to discover what he shares in common with these animals, and
what is peculiar to him, and to him alone. After we have discovered
this we may proceed to inquire into the conditions under which
speech becomes possible, and we shall then have done all that we
can do, considering that the instruments of our knowledge,
wonderful as they are, are yet too weak to carry us into all the
regions to which we may soar on the wings of our imagination.'

As the result of a comparison of the human with the animal kingdom,
Professor Mueller remarks that, 'no one can doubt that certain animals
possess all the physical acquirements for articulate speech. There is no
letter of the alphabet which a parrot will not learn to pronounce. The
fact, therefore, that the parrot is without a language of his own, must
be explained by a difference between the _mental_, not between the
_physical_ faculties of the animal and man; and it is by a comparison of
the mental faculties alone, such as we find them in man and brutes, that
we may hope to discover what constitutes the indispensable qualification
for language, a qualification to be found in man alone, and in no other
creature on earth.'

Of mental faculties, the author whose ideas we are stating, claims a
large share for the higher animals. 'These animals have _sensation_,
_perception_, _memory_, _will_, and _intellect_,