be more useful than here. Sense-impressions an animal
certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And
sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the
realm of feeling; but language--never.

This fact, as a bare undeniable fact, should have startled the Darwinians,
even as it startled the venerable Darwin, when I simply set the facts
before him, and he immediately drew the necessary consequences. Of any
danger there could be no fear. The facts are there and show us the right
path. And it is not only simple facts, but the consequences of preexisting
conditions which render every so-called transition from animal to man
absolutely unthinkable. Language--as ethnologists should have learned--has
neither originated from artificial signs, nor from imitation of sounds.
That we can communicate with signs without saying a word, that we even now
use signs in our speech, is best learned in southern races, and in such
pantomimes as _L'enfant prodigue_. We have long known that imitations of
sound exist in greater or lesser numbers in every language, and how far
they can reach has probably never been shown in such detail as by
myself.(49) But that our Aryan tongues, and also the Semitic, and all
others that have been studied scientifically, originated from roots, is
now generally known and recognised. That these roots may in remote times
have contained an element of imitation, we may readily concede, for it is
really self-evident; only we should not from the beginning bar our way by
conceiving them as mere imitations of sound. If this were so, the problem
of language would long since have been solved, and the first formation of
ideas would require no further reflection. It must be conceded on the
other side that the origin of roots still contains much that is obscure,
and that even Noire's _clamor concomitans_ does not explain every case.
Only it is firmly established that a scientific analysis of language
leaves a certain number of roots which are not mere sound-imitations, such
as "bow wow," or "moo moo." There are people who have taken much pains to
discover whether the roots ever had an independent existence, or if they
have merely been scientifically abstracted, or shelled out of the words in
which they occur. These are vain questions, for we can never of course
come at the matter historically, and the attempt to prove the necessity of
the one or the other view is a useless undertaki