other hand, there is, in the use of words in
general, so much to which nature affords no clew or index, that this whole
process of communicating thought by speech, seems to be artificial. Under
an other head, I have already cited from Sanctius some opinions of the
ancient grammarians and philosophers on this point. With the reasoning of
that zealous instructor, the following sentence from Dr. Blair very
obviously accords: "To suppose words invented, or names given to things, in
a manner purely arbitrary, without any ground or reason, is to suppose an
effect without a cause. There must have always been some motive which led
to the assignation of one name rather than an other."--_Rhet._, Lect. vi,
p. 55.

2. But, in their endeavours to explain the origin and early progress of
language, several learned men, among whom is this celebrated lecturer, have
needlessly perplexed both themselves and their readers, with sundry
questions, assumptions, and reasonings, which are manifestly contrary to
what has been made known to us on the best of all authority. What signifies
it[18] for a man to tell us how nations rude and barbarous invented
interjections first,[19] and then nouns, and then verbs,[20] and finally
the other parts of speech; when he himself confesses that he does not know
whether language "can be considered a human invention at all;" and when he
believed, or ought to have believed, that the speech of the first man,
though probably augmented by those who afterwards used it, was,
essentially, the one language of the earth for more than eighteen
centuries? The task of inventing a language _de novo_, could surely have
fallen upon no man but Adam; and he, in the garden of Paradise, had
doubtless some aids and facilities not common to every wild man of the
woods.

3. The learned Doctor was equally puzzled to conceive, "either how society
could form itself, previously to language, or how words could rise into a
language, previously to society formed."--_Blair's Rhet._, Lect. vi, p. 54.
This too was but an idle perplexity, though thousands have gravely pored
over it since, as a part of the study of rhetoric; for, if neither could be
previous to the other, they must have sprung up simultaneously. And it is a
sort of slander upon our prime ancestor, to suggest, that, because he was
"_the first_," he must have been "_the rudest_" of his race; and that,
"consequently, those first rudiments of speech," which alone the
supposition