that can overbear his own. One thing I am certain about: namely, that neither Müller nor Steinthal has answered me. As Mr. Müller appreciates so fully the danger in which I am placed, I wonder that he is not willing to put forth a hand to save me from it. I have with these gentlemen, so far as concerns my side, only a scientific controversy, sustaining my view of language against their contrary (and mutually conflicting) opinions. If I have been over-warm in assault, that is my disadvantage as well as my fault, as I thereby lay myself the more open to a counter-attack, having no right to claim to be treated more gently. But I have a right to protest against the controversy being made a personal instead of a scientific one; against being met with the plea that I am too disrespectful to the magnates of science for my arguments to deserve attention. Such a reply is generally, and justly, regarded as equivalent to a confession of weakness.
It has, perhaps, been my misfortune not to appreciate sufficiently the services rendered by Prof. Müller to the science of language; certainly, while fully acknowledging what he has done toward spreading a degree of knowledge of its facts, and, by his prestige and eloquence, attracting to them the attention of many who might have been reached in no other way, I might have been able to see that he helped either to broaden its foundations or to strengthen its superstructure. In ways and for reasons which I have sufficiently detailed in other places, his views have seemed to me wanting in solidity of basis, and in consistency and logical coherence. The difference between us is by no means of that slight character which, in his article, he gives it the air of being—"a slight matter of terminology," and the like; it reaches to the bottom. Holding as I do, I cannot expect that his proposed work on "Language as the True Barrier between Man and Beast," whatever its general interest and readableness, will be a contribution of serious importance to the discussion of the subject. Nor, indeed, that, by any one, more can be made of this barrier than has been made of the various others, which a profounder zoological and anthropological science has thrown down, claiming that no impassable barrier, but only an impracticable distance, separates the two—and separates them just as effectively. If my view of the nature of language is the true one, the absence of speech in the lower animals is easily seen to be correlated with many other deficiencies incident to their inferiority of endowment; they have no civilization, no "institutions" of any kind; nothing that goes down by tradition, is taught and learned. Their means of communication is almost wholly intuitive, not arbitrary and conventional, which are the most essential and highest attributes of ours. I say "almost," because I think the want not absolute; the rudiments of speech are just as much present in animals as, for example, those of the use of instruments; on account of which latter, Mr. Muller pronounces the "use of tools" no barrier.
Human language began when sign-making by instinct became sign--
