ctions, and his perceptions
by onomatopoieia. He possessed likewise the faculty of giving more
articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind. That
faculty was not of his own making. It was an instinct, an instinct
of the mind as irresistible as any other instinct. So far as
language is the production of that instinct, it belongs to the
realm of nature. Man loses his instincts as he ceases to want them.
His senses become fainter when, as in the case of scent, they
become useless. Thus the creative faculty which gave to each
conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a
phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled.
The number of these _phonetic types_ must have been almost infinite
in the beginning, and it was only through the same process of
_natural elimination_ which we observed in the early history of
words, that clusters of roots, more or less synonymous, were
gradually reduced to one definite type.'

Professor Max Mueller occupies a commanding position in the foremost rank
of the students of Philology. His work on _The Science of Language_,
from which the preceding discussion of the Origin of Speech is taken,
is, so far as I am aware, the latest volume treating of the problem in
question which has issued from what is commonly regarded as high
authority in the department of Language. It is to that volume,
therefore, that we are to look for the last word of elucidation which
the Comparative Philologist can furnish respecting it. And it is for
this reason--in order that we might have before us the results of the
latest research of the schools--that the exposition of the Origin of
Language given in the work referred to has been so fully stated.

Where, then, does this explanation of the problem leave us? Does it go
to the bottom of the matter? Is it sufficiently distinct and
satisfactory? In brief, does it give us any clear understanding of the
Origin of Speech? Does it not rather leave us at the crucial point of
the whole inquiry, with the essence and core of the subject untouched
and shrouded in mystery? Some indefinite hundreds of roots, obtained, it
is assumed, by means of some indescribable and unknown mental instinct!
This is the sober and contented answer of Philology to the investigator
who would know of the Sources of Language, and its constituent elements.
But of the component p