of language." As Lyell says, "It was a profound saying of William Humboldt, that 'Man is Man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already Man.' Other animals may be able to utter sounds more articulate and as varied as the click of the Bushman, but voice alone can never enable brute intelligence to acquire language."[1] Yet perhaps because the power of speaking is supposed to belong to the Sing-sing and parrot, these animals are also credited with the possession of other extaordinary endowments, for the Sing-sing knows the past and the parrot the future. This bird can even understand and interpret dreams, and it has some notion of piety, for it has been heard to recite Buddhist prayers, and it has been seen sitting in ecstatic meditation seeking to attain that supreme supernatural intelligence which all true Buddhists seek finally to acquire.
But the faculty of speech in its full meaning is the property of man only. It is his characteristic possession, that which makes him man.[2] The first men spoke as they were moved, without aim and without effort, but their speech was only the air made vocal. It was, indeed, the music of an "œolian flute," the free whistling of heaven. Still it was only whistling, and, as an old philosopher says, human speech is not whistling. He who speaks says something, and though in what he says there is nothing absolute, yet there is a difference between his speech and the chirp of a chick.[3] In man, writes a practical statesman,[4] speech is the handle of the moral nature, the lord of action, the motive power of the mind, and the visible expression of the body, and with man alone words are capable of communicating ideas. The object of speech is to give expression to the feelings and thoughts. But that it is not a perfect instrument was long ago seen and acknowledged by the Chinese. Thus we are told that as writing does
