finger-drawing of its outline in the air, or by the reproduction of one of its characteristic features, or by some purely symbolic movement. Thus, a deaf-mute gesture for ‘smoke’ is a spiral action of the forefinger from below upwards; for ‘child,’ the action of cradling and rocking the right elbow in the left hand; for ‘truth,’ the movement of the forefinger in a straight line from the mouth. This gesture-language has its own syntax, its own laws of growth and change, its own psychological history; but it could not hold its own against articulate speech. The struggle was, in all probability, brief; because, at the very beginning, _speech itself was a gesture_; the essential thing about it was not the sound, but the movement. If, then, gesture-language is older than speech, it can hardly be much older; for the sound that accompanied the gesture would soon attract attention, and the superiority of articulate sound over visible movement would soon be recognised. Attempts have been made, of course,—we may say ‘of course’ at this point of our psychological knowledge!—to read a meaning into the sounds themselves. There is a theory which traces the origin of language to the imitation of natural sounds, and so makes it begin with words like _hiss_ and _roar_; and there is a theory which traces it to ejaculations and merely mechanical utterances, and so makes it begin with _oh_ and _ah_ and a sort of infantile babble. Neither of these theories will hold water. Apart from the psychological arguments, which we cannot here set forth, there is the evidence of fact: words like _hiss_ and _roar_ form a very small part of the vocabulary of any language; exclamations and interjections are emotive and not ideational, and have had but little development; and the babble of the human infant is not primitive, but corresponds with a stage in the maturing of an inherited speech-mechanism. No! _the sound was, at first, simply the incidental accompaniment of the gesture_, of a movement which included the muscles of the larynx; it derived its meaning from the gesture-context; and presently, under the influence of continued social intercourse, it proved its superiority to gesture and acquired its independence. We may say in the large that _the word heard has never had any other than a derivative and symbolic meaning_, and that _the self-sufficiency of the word-gesture, combined sound and movement, is the origin of language_.