The Speech of Monkeys

CHAPTER XXV. Facts and Fancies of Speech--Language in the Vegetable Kingdom--Language in the Mineral Kingdom. In the early part of this work I have recorded the material and tangible facts with which I have dealt, and have not departed from such facts to formulate a theory beyond a working hypothesis. I have not allowed myself to be transported into the realm of fancy, nor have I claimed for my work anything which lies beyond the bounds of proof. But in the wide range through which I have sought for the first hint of speech, it is only natural that many theories have suggested themselves to me from time to time, some of which would appear almost like the dreams of hasheesh. But while they are like the fairyland of speculation, they are not more wild and incoherent than are many of the dogmas of metaphysics. And at this point I shall digress from my text so far as to say that I have followed the motives of language through the higher planes of life and thence downward to the very sunrise to the vegetable kingdom, and on through the dim twilight across the mineral world to that point where elemental matter is first delivered from the hands of force. Standing upon the elevated plane of human development, it is difficult for man to stoop to the level of those inferior forms from which he is so far removed in all his faculties; but if his senses could be made so delicate as to discern the facts, he would find perhaps that in the polity of life all horizons are equidistant from each other. But looking back from where he stands, his powers fail to reach the real point of vital force at which all life began, and his contracted senses bring the vanishing point of this perspective far into the foreground of the facts.