Max Mueller, following Professor Heyse, of Berlin, published an ingenious theory of primitive speech, to the effect that man had a creative faculty giving to each conception, as it thrilled through his brain for the first time, a special phonetic expression, which faculty became extinct when its necessity ceased.  This theory, which makes each radical of language to be a phonetic type rung out from the organism of the first man or men when struck by an idea, has been happily named the “ding-dong” theory.  It has been abandoned mainly through the destructive criticisms of Prof.  W.D.  WHITNEY, of Yale College.  One lucid explanation by the latter should be specially noted:  “A word is a combination of sounds which by a series of historical reasons has come to be accepted and understood in a certain community as the sign of a certain idea.  As long as they so accept and understand it, it has existence; when everyone ceases to use and understand it, it ceases to exist.”

Several authors, among them Kaltschmidt, contend that there was but one primitive language, which was purely onomatopoeic, that is, imitative of natural sounds.  This has been stigmatized as the “bow-wow” theory, but its advocates might derive an argument from the epithet itself, as not only our children, but the natives of Papua, call the dog a “bow-wow.”  They have, however, gone too far in attempting to trace back words in their shape as now existing to any natural sounds instead of confining that work to the roots from which the words have sprung.

Another attempt has been made, represented by Professor Noire, to account for language by means of interjectional cries.  This Max Mueller revengefully styled the “pooh-pooh” theory.  In it is included the rhythmical sounds which a body of men make seemingly by a common impulse when engaged in a common work, such as the cries of sailors when hauling on a rope or pulling an oar, or the yell of savages in an attack.  It also derives an argument from the impulse of life by which the child shouts and the bird sings.  There are, however, very few either words or roots of words which can be proved to have that derivation.

Professor SAYCE, in his late work, Introduction to the Science of Language, London, 1880, gives the origin of language in gestures, in onomatopoeia, and to a limited extent in interjectional cries.  He concludes it to be the ordinary theory of modern comparative philologists that all languages are traced back to a certain number of abstract roots, each of which was a sort of sentence in embryo, and while he does not admit this as usually presented, he believes that there was a time in the history of speech, when the articulate or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primitive men were made the significant representations of thought by the gestures with which they were accompanied.  This statement is specially gratifying to the present writer as he had advanced much the same views in his first publication on the subject in the following paragraph, now reproduced with greater confidence: