ot peculiar to man. It
exists in many birds, and in some attains a marked development. The
mocking bird, for instance, has an extraordinary flexibility of the
vocal organs and power of imitating the voices of other birds. The
parrot and some other birds go farther in this direction, being capable
of using articulate language and clearly repeating words used by man.

None of the mammalia possess this facility. It is not found in the apes,
and probably was not possessed by the ancestor of man. But it is not
difficult to believe that in the efforts of the latter to gain a greater
variety of vocal utterance, its organs of speech became more flexible,
and in time it gained the power of articulation.

There are races of existing men whose powers of language seem still in
the transition stage between articulate and inarticulate speech. This
seems the case with the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa, whose
vocal utterances consist largely of a series of peculiar clicks that are
certainly not articulate speech, though on the road toward it. The
Pygmies of the Central African forests seem similarly to occupy an
intermediate position in the development of language. Those who have
endeavored to talk with them speak of their utterance as being
inarticulate in sound. It appears to be a sort of link between
articulate and inarticulate speech. In short, the great abyss which was
of old thought to lie between the languages of man and the lower animals
has largely vanished through the labors of philologists, and we can
trace stepping-stones over every portion of the wide gap. The language
of man has not alone been evidently a product of evolution, but also one
of development from the vocal utterances of the lower animals; and the
man-ape, in its slow and long progress from brute into man, seems to
have gradually developed that noble instrument of articulate speech
which has had so much to do with subsequent human progress.

VIII

HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED

In his bodily formation the man-ape differed little from man. The
differences which existed were probably of a minor character, no greater
than could readily exist within the limits of a species. If this
assertion be questioned, it seems sufficient to call attention to the
recent researches into the anatomy of the anthropoid apes, which differ
in species, if not in genera, from man, yet are closely similar to him
in all their main features of organization. Even in the