the expression of thought in oral sounds is speech.
[Sidenote: NATURE OF SPEECH] Speech is not an invention, and therefore
is not symbolic in its radical nature. True, that much that is symbolic
has been added to it, and its bounds have been widened as men have risen
in the scale of civil life, until our higher types of modern speech have
departed so far from the natural modes of speech and first forms of
expression, that we can rarely trace a single word to its ultimate
source. And viewing it as we do from our present standpoint, it appears
to be purely symbolic; but if that be so, then we must deny the first
law of progress, and assign the origin of this faculty to that class of
phenomena known as miracles, which once explained by increasing the
mystery what we could not understand, and served at the same time to
conceal the exact magnitude of our ignorance; but as we added little by
little to our stock of knowledge, such phenomena were brought within the
realm of our understanding, and to-day our children are familiar with
the causes of many simple effects which our forefathers dared not
attempt to solve, but reverently ascribed to the immediate influence of
Divinity. If speech in its ultimate nature is symbolic, what must have
been the condition of man before its invention, and how did he arrive at
the first term or sound of speech? He did not invent sound nor the
means of making it. He did not invent thought, the thing which speech
expresses, and it is no more reasonable to believe that he invented
speech than to believe that he invented the faculties of sight and
hearing, which are certainly the natural products of his organic nature
and environments. So far as I can find through the whole range of animal
life, all forms of land mammals possess vocal organs which are developed
in a degree corresponding to the condition of the brain, and seem to be
in every instance as capable of producing and controlling sounds as the
brain is of thinking: in other words, the power of expression is in
perfect keeping with the power of thinking. From my acquaintance with
the animal kingdom, it is my firm belief that all mammals possess the
faculty of speech in a degree commensurate with their experience and
needs, and that domestic animals have a somewhat higher type of speech
than their wild progenitors. Why are all forms of mammals endowed with
vocal organs? Why should Nature bestow on them these organs if not
designed for use? On