the same origin and
evolution as the others. Vico, Strabo, and others have asserted that
primitive men spoke in song, and there is great truth in the remark.
Since gesture and pantomime help out the meaning of imperfect speech,
which was at first poor in the number of words and their relative forms,
and this is still the case among many peoples, so song, vocal
modulation, and the rhythmic expression of speech seem to stimulate
emotion. In truth, the mental and physiological effort which tends by
vocal enunciation to present the image or emotion in an external form,
is on the one hand not yet fully disintegrated, and on the other the
greater or less intensity of feeling involved in primitive languages a
corresponding vocal modulation to supplement it, just as it required
gesture and pantomime. Thus speech, gesture, and song, in the larger
sense of the word, had their origin together. This is also true of many
of the languages of modern savages, and of those of more civilized
peoples, such as the Chinese, which have not quite attained inflection;
in this case the frequent repetition of the same monosyllable conveys a
different meaning, not only from its relative position, but from the
modulation and tone in which it is uttered. The same thing may be
observed in children who are just beginning to talk.

Rhythm, or the graduated and alternate action and reaction with which a
vibration begins and ends, is a universal law in the manifestation and
movements of all natural phenomena; a law which is revealed on a grand
scale in all the recurring periods of nature, whether astral, telluric,
or meteorological, as well as in the form and manifold phases of
organisms and their modes of reproduction. This universal law also
applies to the whole mental and organic system of animals and men,
whenever they become conscious of their own existence. The same
universal rhythm constitutes the fundamental form of sound in the
vibration of metallic bars, or of strings, and becomes perceptible to
the external senses by means of our organ of hearing, as also by the
external and innate necessity slowly developed by our habits of
consciousness, which may be termed the external causes of its organic
evolution and constitution.

By these organic and cosmic tendencies, and by the intrinsic impulse
towards modulation of sound already explained, speech first issued from
the human breast in harmonious accents and rhythmic form, and these
became in the