t of a zooelogical garden.

As for ethnological museums, they certainly give us wonderful glimpses
into the skilfulness of primitive man, especially in what relates to the
struggle for life; but of the historic or prehistoric age of these wood,
horn, and stone weapons, they tell us absolutely nothing. Whoever thinks
that man descended from an ape, may no doubt say that flint implements for
kindling fire belonged to a higher period, _post hominem natum_, although
it has been thought that even apes could have imitated such weapons,
though they could not have invented them. Romanes, in his book on _Mental
Evolution in Animals_, has collected a large number of illustrations of
animal skilfulness; the majority of them, however, are explained by mere
mimicry; of a development of original ideas peculiar to animals in their
wild state, apart from the contact and influence of human society, there
is no trace. Even the most intelligent animal, the elephant, acquires
reason only in its intercourse with men, and similarly the more or less
trained apes, dogs, parrots, etc. All this is very interesting reading,
and an English weekly, _The Spectator_, has from week to week given us
similar anecdotes about wonderfully gifted animals from all parts of the
earth, but these matters lie outside the narrow sphere of science.

What then remains to enable us to study the earliest phase of development
of the human mind accessible to us? If we go to savages, whose language we
only understand imperfectly, these observations are of course still more
untrustworthy than in the case of our own children; at all events we must
wait before we receive any really valuable evidence of the development of
the human mind from that source. I repeat that the human mind itself, as
far as it perceives, must simply be accepted as a fact, given to us and
inexplicable, whether in civilised or uncivilised races; but only in its
greatest simplicity, as mere self-conscious perception--a perception which
in this simplicity can in no wise be denied to animals, although we can
only with difficulty form a clear idea of the peculiarity of their
sentient perceptions.

Where can we observe the first steps that rise above this simple
perception? I say, as I have always said, In language and in language
alone. Language is the oldest monument which we possess of man's mental
power, older than stone weapons, than cuneiform inscriptions, than
hieroglyphics. The development of la