so inadequate and weak that it required
support from the gesture language to become intelligible. This mixed
language still survives among some of the inferior races of men. Miss
Kingsley and Tylor have pointed out that tribes in Africa have to gather
round the camp fires at night in order to converse, because their
vocabulary is so incomplete that without being reinforced by gesture and
pantomime they would be unable to communicate with one another. Gesture is
indispensable for giving precision to vocal sounds in many languages, e.g.
those of the Tasmanians, Greenlanders, savage tribes of Brazil, and Grebos
of Western Africa. In other cases speech is associated with inarticulate
sounds. These sounds have been compared to clicking and clapping, and
according to Sayce, these clickings and clappings survive as though to show
us how man when deprived of speech can fix and transmit his thoughts by
certain sounds. These mixed states represent articulate speech in its
primordial state; they represent the stage of transition from pure
pantomime to articulate speech.

It seems, then, that originally man had two languages at his disposal which
he used simultaneously or interchangeably. They supported each other in the
intercommunication of ideas, but speech has triumphed because of its
greater practical utility. The language of gesture is disadvantageous for
the following reasons: (1) it monopolises the use of the hands; (2) it has
the disadvantage that it does not carry any distance; (3) it is useless in
the dark; (4) it is vague in character; (5) it is imitative in nature and
permits only of the intercommunication of ideas based upon concrete images.
Speech, on the other hand, is transmitted in the dark and with objects
intervening; moreover, distance affects its transmission much less. The
images of auditory and visual symbols in the growth of speech replace in
our minds concrete images and they permit of abstract thought. It is
dependent primarily upon the ear, an organ of exquisite feeling, whose
sensations are infinite in number and in kind. This sensory receptor with
its cerebral perceptor has in the long process of time, aided by vision,
under the influence of natural laws of the survival of the fittest,
educated and developed an instrument of simple construction (primarily
adapted only for the vegetative functions of life and simple vocalisation)
into that wonderful instrument the human voice; but by that development,
bo