entirely different character from that of gesture proper; moreover,
from being in time only, not in space, it is apprehended more
immediately by the inner sense, and the impression received is more
intimate, more forcible. Still it retains the same lyric or subjective
character.

It was, I believe, Lord Monboddo who first observed that inarticulate
sound, music in its most primitive form, is the earliest form of
utterance, and is prior to language. Lord Monboddo's researches into
the origin and progress of language (1773) were valued so highly by
Herder that they were at his instance translated into German. The
conclusion at which he arrived, that the most primitive form of
utterance is not language but music, that language grew out of song
just as the art of writing grew out of picture-painting, is especially
valuable from the fact that it was afterwards adopted by Charles
Darwin.[14]

[Footnote 14: Descent of Man, Pt. III., ch. 19. The whole of that part
of the chapter may be read in this connection. Unfortunately, the
speculations are somewhat vitiated by the _idee fixe_ of modern
science that everything must be referred to "courtship." i.e.
sexuality.]

The "music" which Darwin and Lord Monboddo conceive as the vocal
expression of primitive man is of course not the highly-wrought
product which we now understand under that term; we may suppose it to
have been _rhythmic_ but not _metric_. It was nearer to the
cries of wild animals, and to some it may seem at first absurd to
describe such sounds as music at all. I do not think so; on the
contrary I find in the cries of some animals and many birds all the