The Speech of Monkeys

True, that much that is symbolic has been added to it, and its bounds have been widened as men have risen in the scale of civil life, until our higher types of modern speech have departed so far from the natural modes of speech and first forms of expression, that we can rarely trace a single word to its ultimate source. And viewing it as we do from our present standpoint, it appears to be purely symbolic; but if that be so, then we must deny the first law of progress, and assign the origin of this faculty to that class of phenomena known as miracles, which once explained by increasing the mystery what we could not understand, and served at the same time to conceal the exact magnitude of our ignorance; but as we added little by little to our stock of knowledge, such phenomena were brought within the realm of our understanding, and to-day our children are familiar with the causes of many simple effects which our forefathers dared not attempt to solve, but reverently ascribed to the immediate influence of Divinity. If speech in its ultimate nature is symbolic, what must have been the condition of man before its invention, and how did he arrive at the first term or sound of speech? He did not invent sound nor the means of making it.