The Speech of Monkeys

[Sidenote: GRAMMAR AND RHETORIC] In the more refined tongues of human speech, we go beyond that code of laws called grammar and amplify them into rhetoric. This branch of the science of speech could find no place among the lower types, as the words are few from which they may select; and so exact and arbitrary is the meaning of each one, and so uniform the relations, that no great variety of expression can be made with such a limited vocabulary. Their eloquence is in their brevity of speech. But while the types of speech used by the lower primates occupy a plane so low in the scale, they are as truly speech as the vocal organs that produce the sounds are truly vocal organs. Life is life, in what form soever it is found. It is not less real in the mollusc than in the man. The same is true of emotion, of thought, of expression, and of speech. Life, emotion, thought, expression, and speech began in embryo, and have developed co-ordinately with all the faculties possessed by man. They are as dependent upon each other as matter is on force, and as inseparable as light from energy. Speech is the physical manifestation of which thought is the ultimate force; it is a spoke in the chariot-wheels of consciousness; it is the body of which thought is the soul.