allows to him or to his family, "must have been poor and
narrow."--_Blair's Rhet._, p. 54. It is far more reasonable to think, with
a later author, that, "Adam had an insight into natural things far beyond
the acutest philosopher, as may be gathered from his giving of names to all
creatures, according to their different constitutions."--_Robinson's
Scripture Characters_, p. 4.

4. But Dr. Blair is not alone in the view which he here takes. The same
thing has bean suggested by other learned men. Thus Dr. James P. Wilson, of
Philadelphia, in an octavo published in 1817, says: "It is difficult to
discern how communities could have existed without language, and equally so
to discover how language could have obtained, in a peopled world, prior to
society."--_Wilson's Essay on Gram._, p. 1. I know not how so many
professed Christians, and some of them teachers of religion too, with the
Bible in their hands, can reason upon this subject as they do. We find
them, in their speculations, conspiring to represent primeval man, to use
their own words, as a "_savage_, whose 'howl at the appearance of danger,
and whose exclamations of joy at the sight of his prey, reiterated, or
varied with the change of objects, were probably the origin of
language.'--_Booth's Analytical Dictionary_. In the dawn of society, ages
may have passed away, with little more converse than what these efforts
would produce."--_Gardiner's Music of Nature_, p. 31. Here Gardiner quotes
Booth with approbation, and the latter, like Wilson, may have borrowed his
ideas from Blair. Thus are we taught by a multitude of guessers, grave,
learned, and oracular, that the last of the ten parts of speech was in fact
the first: "_Interjections_ are exceedingly interesting in one respect.
They are, there can be little doubt, _the oldest words_ in all languages;
and may be considered the elements of speech."--_Bucke's Classical Gram._,
p. 78. On this point, however, Dr. Blair seems not to be quite consistent
with himself: "Those exclamations, therefore, which by grammarians are
called _interjections_, uttered in a strong and passionate manner, were,
_beyond doubt_, the first elements or beginnings of speech."--_Rhet._,
Lect. vi, p. 55. "The _names_ of sensible objects were, _in all languages_,
the words most early introduced."--_Rhet._, Lect. xiv, p. 135. "The _names
of sensible objects_," says Murray too, "were the words most early
introduced."--_Octavo Gram._, p. 336. Bat what