hares in, nor is
capable of development; they stand like "dead sticks in a live hedge." By
far the greater number of roots, and all which are capable of development,
express abstractions from visible objects, conditions and activities, and
therefore presume a human intelligence, reflecting with self-consciousness,
which formed and used the roots.

Now Max Mueller sees, back of this period, still open to science, in which
the root-elements of the human languages were fixed, a long period of
exuberant and unhindered growth of the elements of language, in which the
roots were separated from the multitude of nascent tones by elimination or
natural selection in the struggle for existence. In this realm, which is no
longer open to investigation, the naturalistic and the linguistic friends
of the evolution theory are now in entire accord. Wilhelm Bleek, in his
small, but very noteworthy essay, "Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache" ("Origin
of Language"), Weimar, Boehlau, 1868, p. 11, uses this ingenious figure:
what the animal world possesses analogous to language, takes about the same
position as, in the art of printing, the block-print does in relation to
printing with movable types. On page 12, he sees in the communication of
the emotions among animals the sources from which under favorable
conditions (in consequence of which the separation of language into
articulated parts became possible) human language might have originated.
This idea, which is closely joined to the interjectional theory, Darwin
meets {98} with a related idea, depending upon the onomatopoetical theory,
when he says, in his "Descent of Man": "Since monkeys certainly understand
much that is said to them by man, and when wild, utter signal-cries of
danger to their fellows, may not some unusually wise ape-like animal have
imitated the growl of a beast of prey, and thus told his fellow-monkeys the
nature of the expected danger? This would have been a first step in the
formation of language."

But philology, from the point where it goes farther back in search of the
roots of language, leaves the safe ground of knowledge and commits itself
to the fluctuating ocean of conjectures; and since also the scientific
evolution theory has only a hypothetical value, the support of a hypothesis
in the one science by a hypothesis in the other naturally adds no weight to
its probability, either for the one or the other. Besides, we must not
overlook the fact that the very point