s--Possible Origin of
Negative and Positive Signs.

In my intercourse with these little creatures, I cannot forget how often
I have caught the spirit of their tones when no ray of meaning as mere
words of speech had dawned upon me, and it is partly through such means
that I have been able to interpret them. As a rule, each act of a monkey
is attended by some sound, and each sound by some act, which, to another
monkey of the same species, always means a certain thing. There are many
cases, perhaps, in which acquired words or shades of dialect are not
quite clear to them, just as we often find in human speech; but monkeys
appear to meet this difficulty and overcome it, just as men do. They
talk with one another on a limited number of subjects, but in very few
words, which they frequently repeat if necessary. Their language is
purely one of sounds, and while those sounds are accompanied by signs,
as a rule, I think they are quite able to get along better with the
sounds alone than with the signs alone. The rules by which we may
interpret the sounds of Simian speech are the same as those by which we
would interpret human speech. If you should be cast away upon an island
inhabited by some strange race of people whose speech was so unlike your
own that you could not understand a single word of it, you would watch
the actions of those people and see what act they did in connection with
any sound they made, and in this way you would gradually learn to
associate a certain sound with a certain act, until at last you would be
able to understand the sound without seeing the act at all; and such is
the simple line I have pursued in the study of the speech of this
little race--only I have been compelled to resort to some very novel
means of doing my part of the talking. Since I have been so long
associated with them, I have learned to know in many cases what act they
will perform in response to certain sounds; and as I grow more and more
familiar with these sounds, I become better able to distinguish them,
just as we do with human speech.

[Sidenote: SPECIFIC TERMS]

Until recently, I have believed that their sounds were so limited in
number as to preclude any specific terms in their vocabulary; but now I
am inclined to modify this opinion somewhat, as I have reason to believe
that they have some specific terms--such as a word for monkey, another
word for fruit, and so on. They do not specify, perhaps, the various
kinds of m