o deny them
the germs of thought, language, and reason--not to say a good deal
more than the germs? It seems to me that not knowing what else to
say that animals communicated if it was not ideas, and not knowing
what mess he might not get into if he admitted that they had ideas
at all, he thought it safer to omit his accusative case altogether.

That growling and barking cannot be called a very highly specialized
language goes without saying; they are, however, so much diversified
in character, according to circumstances, that they place a
considerable number of symbols at an animal's command, and he
invariably attaches the same symbol to the same idea. A cat never
purrs when she is angry, nor spits when she is pleased. When she
rubs her head against anyone affectionately it is her symbol for
saying that she is very fond of him, and she expects, and usually
finds that it will be understood. If she sees her mistress raise
her hand as though to pretend to strike her, she knows that it is
the symbol her mistress invariably attaches to the idea of sending
her away, and as such she accepts it. Granted that the symbols in
use among the lower animals are fewer and less highly differentiated
than in the case of any known human language, and therefore that
animal language is incomparably less subtle and less capable of
expressing delicate shades of meaning than our own, these
differences are nevertheless only those that exist between highly
developed and inchoate language; they do not involve those that
distinguish language from no language. They are the differences
between the undifferentiated protoplasm of the amoeba and our own
complex organization; they are not the differences between life and
no life. In animal language as much as in human there is a mind
intentionally making use of a symbol accepted by another mind as
invariably attached to a certain idea, in order to produce that idea
in the mind which it is desired to affect--more briefly, there is a
sayer, a sayee, and a covenanted symbol designedly applied. Our own
speech is vertebrated and articulated by means of nouns, verbs, and
the rules of grammar. A dog's speech is invertebrate, but I do not
see how it is possible to deny that it possesses all the essential
elements of language.

I have said nothing about Professor R. L. Garner's researches into
the language of apes, because they have not yet been so far verified
and accepted as to make it safe to rel