doctrine is so impregnably founded in the properly understood facts of linguistic history, and in the necessary conditions and forces of its earliest period, that they can well afford to be modest, and even reserved, in their attempts to explain particulars. Always and everywhere in language, as we have abundantly seen in our earlier inquiries into the processes of linguistic growth, when once the mutually intelligible sign is found, its origin is liable to be forgotten and obscured. There was doubtless a period in the progress of speech when its whole structure was palpably onomatopoetic; but not a long one: the onomatopoetic stage was only a stepping-stone to something higher and better. Especially, perhaps, was this the case in the language of our own branch of the human race, whose nobler endowments must have begun very early their career of superior development. If we could trace the roots of the other families of language back to the same remote stage, we might find in some of them more evident traces of the primal imitative condition; we may even yet find the same principle dominant to a much higher degree through the whole history of one or other of those families than in our own.
How many may have been the individual proposals of signs which were made ineffectively, to be disregarded or soon forgotten again, or how many the special signs which gained a certain currency in the minor groups of the language-making community, but failed to win that general acceptance which should make them the germs of a transmitted and perpetuated language, we do not and cannot know. Nor can we know how numerous, or of what social constitution, or in what condition of life, was the community which thus formed the speech of a linguistic family or of the whole human race; nor how rapid was the accumulation of uttered words of general intelligibility, nor how great the store gathered by direct imitative process, nor how long the period during which they and their like were made to answer the purposes of communication, anterior to the beginning of structural development. On all such topics as these—as we have found occasion to remark before (in the seventh lecture), when treating of similar subjects—even our guesses
28
