If all that Professor Max Muller means to say is, that no animal but man commands an articulate language, with verbs and nouns, or is ever likely to command one (and I question whether in reality he means much more than this), no one will differ from him.  No dog or elephant has one word for bread, another for meat, and another for water.  Yet, when we watch a cat or dog dreaming, as they often evidently do, can we doubt that the dream is accompanied by a mental image of the thing that is dreamed of, much like what we experience in dreams ourselves, and much doubtless like the mental images which must have passed through the mind of my deaf and dumb waiter?  If they have mental images in sleep, can we doubt that waking, also, they picture things before their mind’s eyes, and see them much as we do—­too vaguely indeed to admit of our thinking that we actually see the objects themselves, but definitely enough for us to be able to recognize the idea or object of which we are thinking, and to connect it with any other idea, object, or sign that we may think appropriate?

Here we have touched on the second essential element of language.  We laid it down, that its essence lay in the communication of an idea from one intelligent being to another; but no ideas can be communicated at all except by the aid of conventions to which both parties have agreed to attach an identical meaning.  The agreement may be very informal, and may pass so unconsciously from one generation to another that its existence can only be recognized by the aid of much introspection, but it will be always there.  A sayer, a sayee, and a convention, no matter what, agreed upon between them as inseparably attached to the idea which it is intended to convey—­these comprise all the essentials of language.  Where these are present there is language; where any of them are wanting there is no language.  It is not necessary for the sayee to be able to speak and become a sayer.  If he comprehends the sayer—­ that is to say, if he attaches the same meaning to a certain symbol as the sayer does—­if he is a party to the bargain whereby it is agreed upon by both that any given symbol shall be attached invariably to a certain idea, so that in virtue of the principle of associated ideas the symbol shall never be present without immediately carrying the idea along with it, then all the essentials of language are complied with, and there has been true speech though never a word was spoken.

The lower animals, therefore, many of them, possess a part of our own language, though they cannot speak it, and hence do not possess it so fully as we do.  They cannot say “bread,” “meat,” or “water,” but there are many that readily learn what ideas they ought to attach to these symbols when they are presented to them.  It is idle to say that a cat does not know what the cat’s-meat man means when he says “meat.”  The cat knows just as well, neither better nor worse than the cat’s-meat man does, and a great deal better