ods lose it if they have ever learned it, points to the conclusion
that man's ancestors only learned to express themselves in articulate
language at a comparatively recent period. Granted that they learn to
think and reason continually the more and more fully for having done so,
will common sense permit us to suppose that they could neither think nor
reason at all till they could convey their ideas in words?

I will return later to the reason of the lower animals, but will now deal
with the question what it is that constitutes language in the most
comprehensive sense that can be properly attached to it. I have said
already that language to be language at all must not only convey fairly
definite coherent ideas, but must also convey them to another living
being. Whenever two living beings have conveyed and received ideas,
there has been language, whether looks or gestures or words spoken or
written have been the vehicle by means of which the ideas have travelled.
Some ideas crawl, some run, some fly; and in this case words are the
wings they fly with, but they are only the wings of thought or of ideas,
they are not the thought or ideas themselves, nor yet, as Professor Max
Muller would have it, inseparably connected with them. Last summer I was
at an inn in Sicily, where there was a deaf and dumb waiter; he had been
born so, and could neither write nor read. What had he to do with words
or words with him? Are we to say, then, that this most active, amiable
and intelligent fellow could neither think nor reason? One day I had had
my dinner and had left the hotel. A friend came in, and the waiter saw
him look for me in the place I generally occupied. He instantly came up
to my friend, and moved his two forefingers in a way that suggested two
people going about together, this meant "your friend"; he then moved his
forefingers horizontally across his eyes, this meant, "who wears divided
spectacles"; he made two fierce marks over the sockets of his eyes, this
meant, "with the heavy eyebrows"; he pulled his chin, and then touched
his white shirt, to say that my beard was white. Having thus identified
me as a friend of the person he was speaking to, and as having a white
beard, heavy eyebrows, and wearing divided spectacles, he made a munching
movement with his jaws to say that I had had my dinner; and finally, by
making two fingers imitate walking on the table, he explained that I had
gone away. My friend, however, want