“From their own failures and discordancies, linguistic scholars have recently decided that both the ‘bow-wow’ and the ‘ding-dong’ theories are unsatisfactory; that the search for imitative, onomatopoeic, and directly expressive sounds to explain the origin of human speech has been too exclusive, and that many primordial roots of language have been founded in the involuntary sounds accompanying certain actions.  As, however, the action was the essential, and the consequent or concomitant sound the accident, it would be expected that a representation or feigned reproduction of the action would have been used to express the idea before the sound associated with that action could have been separated from it.  The visual onomatopoeia of gestures, which even yet have been subjected to but slight artificial corruption, would therefore serve as a key to the audible.  It is also contended that in the pristine days, when the sounds of the only words yet formed had close connection with objects and the ideas directly derived from them, signs were as much more copious for communication than speech, as the sight embraces more and more distinct characteristics of objects than does the sense of hearing.”

CONCLUSIONS.

The preponderance of authority is in favor of the view that man, when in the possession of all his faculties, did not choose between voice and gesture, both being originally instinctive, as they both are now, and never, with those faculties, was in a state where the one was used to the absolute exclusion of the other.  The long neglected work of Dalgarno, published in 1661, is now admitted to show wisdom when he says:  “non minus naturale fit homini communicare in Figuris quam Sonis:  quorum utrumque dico homini naturale.”  With the voice man at first imitated the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he exhibited actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, and distances, and their derivatives.  It would appear from this unequal division of capacity that oral speech remained rudimentary long after gesture had become an art.  With the concession of all purely imitative sounds and of the spontaneous action of the vocal organs under excitement, it is still true that the connection between ideas and words generally depended upon a compact between the speaker and hearer which presupposes the existence of a prior mode of communication.  That was probably by gesture, which, in the apposite phrase of Professor SAYCE, “like the rope-bridges of the Himalayas or the Andes, formed the first rude means of communication between man and man.”  At the very least it may be gladly accepted provisionally as a clue leading out of the labyrinth of philologic confusion.