ilkes made the same observation on the
Patagonians. This faculty is still more apparent in the lower races.
Many travellers have spoken of the extraordinary tendency to imitation
among the Fuegians; and, according to Monat, the Andaman islanders are
not less disposed to mimicry and imitation. Mitchell states that the
Australians possess the same power.

This fact also applies to the languages of extremely rude and savage
peoples. Some American Indians, for instance, help out their sentences
and make them intelligible by contortion of their features and other
gesticulations, and the same observation was made by Schweinwurth of an
African tribe. The language of the Bosjesmanns requires so many signs to
make the meaning of their words intelligible that it cannot be
understood in the dark. These facts partly explain the natural genesis
of human languages.

We have learned from our earlier observations that phenomena appear to
the perceptive faculty of primitive man as subjects endowed with power.
The subjectivity of these phenomena, their intrinsic conditions and
actions are fused into speech, which is their living and conscious
symbol; and it is clear that the evolution of language from the concrete
to the symbolical, and hence to the simple sign of the object, divested
of its original power, is analogous to that of myth.

This law of evolution also applies to the art of writing, which is at
first only the precise copy of the image; it is next transformed into an
analogous symbol, and then into an alphabetical sign, which serves as
the simple expression of the conception, divested of its originally
representative faculty. Hence it is apparent that the evolution of myth
conforms to the general law of the evolution of human thought, of all
its products and arts in their manifold ramifications. From the image,
the informing subject, from the conception and the myth, the necessary
cycle is accomplished in regular phases, wherever the ethnic temperament
and capacity and extrinsic circumstances permit it, until the rational
idea is reached, the sign or cipher which becomes the powerful
instrument of the exercise and generalization of thought. In order to
show the efficacy of the mythical and scientific faculty of thought
comprised in the systems of ancient and modern philosophy, and its slow
progress towards positive and rational science, we will adduce an
instance from the people in whom such an evolution was accomplished,
a