asic unit of all human languages, which vary
so widely among races of to-day no less than they have in the history of
any single people.

One of the first steps in the making of spoken words was taken by human
beings when they imitated the calls or other sounds produced by living
things, and tacitly agreed to recognize the imitation as a symbol of the
creature making it. Thus the names for the cuckoo and the crow in many
languages besides our own are simply copies of the calls uttered by these
birds; a Tahitian calls a cat _mimi_; the name for a snake almost
invariably includes the hissing attributed to that creature. After a time
words which were at first simply imitations and which referred only to the
things that made these sounds came to refer to certain qualities of the
things imitated, so that the naming of other than natural objects, such as
qualities, began, leading ultimately to the use of words for qualities
belonging to many and different objects in the way of abstractions.

Much light upon the evolution of language is obtained when we treat the
speech of various races as we did the skeletal structures of cats and
seals and whales. When we compare the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and
French languages, they reveal the same general structure in thousands of
their words,--a common basis which in these cases is due to their
derivation from the same ancestor, the Latin tongue. The Latin word for
star is _stella_, and the Italian word of to-day is an identical and
unchanged descendant, like a persistent type of shark which lives now in
practically the same form as did its ancestor in the coal ages. The
Spanish word is _estrella_, a modified derivative, but still one that
bears in its structure the marks of its Latin origin; the French word
_etoile_ is a still more altered product of word evolution. Even in the
German _stern_, Norse _stjern_, Danish _starn_, and English _star_ we may
recognize mutual affinities and common ancestral structure. Choosing
illustrations from a different group, the Hebrew salutation "Peace be with
you," _Shalom lachem_, proves to be a blood cousin of the Arabic _Salaam
alaikum_, indicating the common ancestry of these diverse languages. Among
Polynesian peoples the Tahitian calls a house a _fare_, the Maori of New
Zealand uses _whare_, while the Hawaiian employs the word _hale_, and the
Samoan, _fale_. Whenever we classify and compare human languages, we find
similar consistent anatomica