greater practical utility. The language of gesture is disadvantageous for
the following reasons: (1) it monopolises the use of the hands; (2) it has
the disadvantage that it does not carry any distance; (3) it is useless in
the dark; (4) it is vague in character; (5) it is imitative in nature and
permits only of the intercommunication of ideas based upon concrete images.
Speech, on the other hand, is transmitted in the dark and with objects
intervening; moreover, distance affects its transmission much less. The
images of auditory and visual symbols in the growth of speech replace in
our minds concrete images and they permit of abstract thought. It is
dependent primarily upon the ear, an organ of exquisite feeling, whose
sensations are infinite in number and in kind. This sensory receptor with
its cerebral perceptor has in the long process of time, aided by vision,
under the influence of natural laws of the survival of the fittest,
educated and developed an instrument of simple construction (primarily
adapted only for the vegetative functions of life and simple vocalisation)
into that wonderful instrument the human voice; but by that development,
borrowing the words of Huxley, "man has slowly accumulated and organised
the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every
individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised as upon a
mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured
from his grosser nature by reflecting here and there a ray from the
infinite source of truth." Thought in all the higher mental processes could
not be carried on at all without the aid of language.

Written language probably originated in an analytical process analogous to
the language of gesture. Like that, it: (1) isolates terms; (2) arranges
them in a certain order; (3) translates thoughts in a crude and somewhat
vague form. A curious example of this may be found in Max Müller's "Chips
from a German Workshop," XIV.: "The aborigines of the Caroline Islands sent
a letter to a Spanish captain as follows: A man with extended arms, sign of