rned to stand
up on his hind legs.

Unfortunately, we entirely lack the means of carrying back the history
of human speech to its first beginnings. In the latter half of the
last century, whilst the ferment of Darwinism was freshly seething,
all sorts of speculations were rife concerning the origin of language.
One school sought the source of the earliest words in imitative sounds
of the type of bow-wow; another in interjectional expressions of the
type of tut-tut. Or, again, as was natural in Europe, where, with the
exception of Basque in a corner of the west, and of certain Asiatic
languages, Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish, on the eastern border, all
spoken tongues present certain obvious affinities, the comparative
philologist undertook to construct sundry great families of speech;
and it was hoped that sooner or later, by working back to some
linguistic parting of the ways, the central problem would be solved
of the dispersal of the world's races.

These painted bubbles have burst. The further examination of the forms
of speech current amongst peoples of rude culture has not revealed
a conspicuous wealth either of imitative or of interjectional sounds.
On the other hand, the comparative study of the European, or, as they
must be termed in virtue of the branch stretching through Persia into
India, the Indo-European stock of languages, carries us back three
or four thousand years at most--a mere nothing in terms of
anthropological time. Moreover, a more extended search through the
world, which in many of its less cultured parts furnishes no literary
remains that may serve to illustrate linguistic evolution, shows
endless diversity of tongues in place of the hoped-for system of a
few families; so that half a hundred apparently independent types must
be distinguished in North America alone. For the rest, it has become
increasingly clear that race and language need not go together at all.
What philologist, for instance, could ever discover, if he had no
history to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modern
French, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by way
of blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquest
caused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtic
tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, ousted
some earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to the still
surviving Basque; though it is not in the least necessary, the