nal cries.
He concludes it to be the ordinary theory of modern comparative
philologists that all languages are traced back to a certain number
of abstract roots, each of which was a sort of sentence in embryo,
and while he does not admit this as usually presented, he believes
that there was a time in the history of speech, when the articulate
or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primitive men were made the
significant representations of thought by the gestures with which
they were accompanied. This statement is specially gratifying to the
present writer as he had advanced much the same views in his first
publication on the subject in the following paragraph, now reproduced
with greater confidence:

"From their own failures and discordancies, linguistic scholars have
recently decided that both the 'bow-wow' and the 'ding-dong' theories
are unsatisfactory; that the search for imitative, onomatopoeic, and
directly expressive sounds to explain the origin of human speech has
been too exclusive, and that many primordial roots of language have
been founded in the involuntary sounds accompanying certain actions.
As, however, the action was the essential, and the consequent
or concomitant sound the accident, it would be expected that a
representation or feigned reproduction of the action would have been
used to express the idea before the sound associated with that
action could have been separated from it. The visual onomatopoeia of
gestures, which even yet have been subjected to but slight artificial
corruption, would therefore serve as a key to the audible. It is also
contended that in the pristine days, when the sounds of the only words
yet formed had close connection with objects and the ideas directly
derived from them, signs were as much more copious for communication
than speech, as the sight embraces more and more distinct
characteristics of objects than does the sense of hearing."

_CONCLUSIONS._

The preponderance of authority is in favor of the view that man, when
in the possession of all his faculties, did not choose between voice
and gesture, both being originally instinctive, as they both are now,
and never, with those faculties, was in a state where the one was used
to the absolute exclusion of the other. The long neglected work of
Dalgarno, published in 1661, is now admitted to show wisdom when he
says: "_non minus naturale fit homini communicare in_ Figuris _quam_
Sonis: _quorum utrumque dico homini_ nat