2.  But, in their endeavours to explain the origin and early progress of language, several learned men, among whom is this celebrated lecturer, have needlessly perplexed both themselves and their readers, with sundry questions, assumptions, and reasonings, which are manifestly contrary to what has been made known to us on the best of all authority.  What signifies it[18] for a man to tell us how nations rude and barbarous invented interjections first,[19] and then nouns, and then verbs,[20] and finally the other parts of speech; when he himself confesses that he does not know whether language “can be considered a human invention at all;” and when he believed, or ought to have believed, that the speech of the first man, though probably augmented by those who afterwards used it, was, essentially, the one language of the earth for more than eighteen centuries?  The task of inventing a language de novo, could surely have fallen upon no man but Adam; and he, in the garden of Paradise, had doubtless some aids and facilities not common to every wild man of the woods.

3.  The learned Doctor was equally puzzled to conceive, “either how society could form itself, previously to language, or how words could rise into a language, previously to society formed.”—­Blair’s Rhet., Lect. vi, p. 54.  This too was but an idle perplexity, though thousands have gravely pored over it since, as a part of the study of rhetoric; for, if neither could be previous to the other, they must have sprung up simultaneously.  And it is a sort of slander upon our prime ancestor, to suggest, that, because he was “the first,” he must have been “the rudest” of his race; and that, “consequently, those first rudiments of speech,” which alone the supposition allows to him or to his family, “must have been poor and narrow.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 54.  It is far more reasonable to think, with a later author, that, “Adam had an insight into natural things far beyond the acutest philosopher, as may be gathered from his giving of names to all creatures, according to their different constitutions.”—­Robinson’s Scripture Characters, p. 4.

4.  But Dr. Blair is not alone in the view which he here takes.  The same thing has bean suggested by other learned men.  Thus Dr. James P. Wilson, of Philadelphia, in an octavo published in 1817, says:  “It is difficult to discern how communities could have existed without language, and equally so to discover how language could have obtained, in a peopled world, prior to society.”—­Wilson’s Essay on Gram., p. 1.  I know not how so many professed Christians, and some of them teachers of religion too, with the Bible in their hands, can reason upon this subject as they do.  We find them, in their speculations, conspiring to represent primeval man, to use their own words, as a “savage, whose ’howl at the appearance of danger, and whose exclamations of joy at the sight of his prey, reiterated, or varied with the change of objects,