To-day, after the lapse of ages
since this Second Stone Age, man went up and possessed the land; we with
our new inventions, wants, and newly-acquired tastes have added a legion
of scientifically constructed sounds, built up on the foundation he laid
with his first utterances, for language is not the outcome of race, but
of social contact. As an interpolation the tale of the Egyptian
Psammetichus is worth telling at this stage.

Desirous of finding--as the ancients then thought existed--the original
language of mankind, Psammetichus isolated two babies from birth in
separate apartments, and for two years they were not allowed to hear the
sound of a human voice. At the end of that time they were brought
together and kept for a few hours without food. Psammetichus then
entered the room, and both children uttered the same strange cry,
"Becos, Becos." "Ah!" said Psammetichus, "'Becos, Becos,' why! that is
Phrygian for bread," and Phrygian was said to have been the ancient
universal language of man. Still, however one feels disposed to imagine
what took place in the Baby Kingdom of these remote ages, brief
allusions only will be made to the veiled past, when either
sign-language, or relics, or myths of long descent are presented to us
in the form of nursery-lore.

How many thousands of years have gone by since the period known to
scientists as the Pleistocene was here--a time when the whole of Britain
and North-West Europe wore a glistening mantle of ice, and when man
could scarce exist, save on the fringe of the south-east littoral of
England--none can say. At all events it may be safely assumed that not
till the end of the Pleistocene Era was Britain or Scandinavia the abode
of man, when the fauna and flora assumed approximately their present
condition, and the state of things called Recent by geologists set in.

Whether the Aryans be accepted as the first people to inhabit our
ice-bound shores in the remote past matters little, and from whence they
sprang (according to Max Mueller "somewhere in Asia," or Dr. Schrader
"European Russia," or Herr Penka "from the east to the far west of the
Scandinavian Peninsula") matters still less, "for," says Professor
Huxley, "the speakers of primitive Aryan may have been (themselves) a
mixture of two or more races, just as are the speakers of English or of
French at the present time"; and archaeology takes us no further back
than into the Neolithic or Second Stone Age, when the poetry