out of a common instinctive base.  But their case is nowise different from that, say, of the varying national modes of pictorial representation.  A Japanese picture of a hill both differs from and resembles a typical modern European painting of the same kind of hill.  Both are suggested by and both “imitate” the same natural feature.  Neither the one nor the other is the same thing as, or, in any intelligible sense, a direct outgrowth of, this natural feature.  The two modes of representation are not identical because they proceed from differing historical traditions, are executed with differing pictorial techniques.  The interjections of Japanese and English are, just so, suggested by a common natural prototype, the instinctive cries, and are thus unavoidably suggestive of each other.  They differ, now greatly, now but little, because they are builded out of historically diverse materials or techniques, the respective linguistic traditions, phonetic systems, speech habits of the two peoples.  Yet the instinctive cries as such are practically identical for all humanity, just as the human skeleton or nervous system is to all intents and purposes a “fixed,” that is, an only slightly and “accidentally” variable, feature of man’s organism.

Interjections are among the least important of speech elements.  Their discussion is valuable mainly because it can be shown that even they, avowedly the nearest of all language sounds to instinctive utterance, are only superficially of an instinctive nature.  Were it therefore possible to demonstrate that the whole of language is traceable, in its ultimate historical and psychological foundations, to the interjections, it would still not follow that language is an instinctive activity.  But, as a matter of fact, all attempts so to explain the origin of speech have been fruitless.  There is no tangible evidence, historical or otherwise, tending to show that the mass of speech elements and speech processes has evolved out of the interjections.  These are a very small and functionally insignificant proportion of the vocabulary of language; at no time and in no linguistic province that we have record of do we see a noticeable tendency towards their elaboration into the primary warp and woof of language.  They are never more, at best, than a decorative edging to the ample, complex fabric.

What applies to the interjections applies with even greater force to the sound-imitative words.  Such words as “whippoorwill,” “to mew,” “to caw” are in no sense natural sounds that man has instinctively or automatically reproduced.  They are just as truly creations of the human mind, flights of the human fancy, as anything else in language.  They do not directly grow out of nature, they are suggested by it and play with it.  Hence the onomatopoetic theory of the origin of speech, the theory that would explain all speech as a gradual evolution from sounds of an imitative character, really brings us no nearer to the instinctive level than is language as we know