Speechless Man

Abstract

IN his notice of my work on “Asia,” in last week's issue of NATURE, Mr. Sayce finds fault with me for rejecting the modern doctrine that “man was speechless when the leading races were differentiated from one another.” I certainly do reject that doctrine, but not on the ground that he supposes. I reject it as in itself to the last degree improbable, and as utterly inadequate to account for the conditions which have suggested it. Seeing that there are many more radical forms of speech in the world than there are radical physical types, if indeed any of the physical types can be regarded as radical, anthropologists have somewhat rashly concluded that these forms of speech must have sprung up independently of each other after the dispersion of an assumed speechless human race throughout the world. We are in fact asked to believe that the continents were first peopled, here by a black, there by a white, elsewhere by a yellow, a brown, or a red species, all possibly sprung of one stock, but all still ignorant of any except perhaps a sign-language at the time of the dispersion. Then there came a time or times when these diverse species began all of them to babble independently of each other in their diverse independent settlements. Consequently, while the races may have been originally one, the stock languages had each a separate starting-point, and therefore were never originally one. Hence this sufficiently violent assumption is made in order to explain the present diversity of speech on the globe. I, on the contrary, hold that it is a useless assumption, that it explains nothing, that it is an all but incredible hypothesis, and lastly that the present diversity of speech on the globe admiis of another, a much more simple and rational explanation.