The Speech of Monkeys

To believe that there was a time in the history of the human race when man could not speak, is to destroy his identity as man, and the romance of the alalus could be justified from a scientific standpoint only as a compromise between the giants of science and superstition. Among the tribes of men whose modes of life are simple, whose wants are few, and whose knowledge is confined to their primitive condition, the number of words necessary to convey their thoughts is very limited. Among some savage races there are languages consisting of only a few hundred words at most, while as we rise in the scale of civil and domestic culture, languages become more copious and expressive as the wants become more numerous and the conditions of life more complex. As we descend from man to the lower animals, we find the types of speech degenerate just in proportion as we descend in the mental and moral plane, but it does not lose its identity as speech. Through the whole animal kingdom from man to protozoa, types of speech differ as do the physical types to which they belong. But as the same vital processes are found throughout the whole circle of life, so the same phonetic basis is found through the whole range of speech.