followers to carry out his principles, as they thought, by eliminating the Creator, and reducing the four beginnings to one. If you think that all this rests on well ascertained facts, I have nothing to say except to express my surprise that some men of great learning and undoubted honesty are not so positive as to these facts as you are. But with the exception of a Creator, that is, a subjective Author of the universe, all this is really outside my special province, and I could afford to be silent. Only when Darwin maintains the transition from some highly developed animal into a human being, I say, Stop! Here the student of language has a word to say, and I say that language is something that, even in its most rudimentary form, puts an impassable barrier between beast and man.” Soon after, when I had been asked to give a new course of lectures at the Royal Institution, I had selected this very point, the barrier which language forms between man and brute, for my subject, and as Darwin’s “Descent of Man” was then occupying the thoughts of philosophers, I promised to give a course of lectures on “Darwin’s Philosophy of Language.” Entertaining, as I did, a sincere admiration for Darwin, I felt that it would have been even discourteous to attempt to be courteous to such a man by passing over in silence what he had said on language. This kind of courtesy is most offensive to a true man of science. Otherwise nothing would have been easier than to find antagonists for my purpose, beginning with Epicurus and ending with Mr. H. Wedgwood’s “Etymological Dictionary of the English Language” (second edition, 1872). It so happened that the author of that dictionary was a friend of Darwin’s, and had easily persuaded him that interjections and imitations of natural sounds formed the material elements of all human speech, and that, as certain animals barked, and mocking birds and parrots imitated sounds which they heard, there seemed to be no reason whatever why animals in a few millions of years should not have invented a language of their own. This naturally fell in with Darwin’s own views and wishes, and though he always spoke with great reserve on the subject of language, yet he would have been more than human if he had surrendered his conviction of the descent of man from some kind of animal on account of this, as his friend had assured him, so easily removable barrier of language. Given a sufficient number of years, he thought, and why should not bow-wow and pooh-pooh have evolved into “I bark” and “I despise”? The fact that no animal had ever evolved such words could not be denied, but it could be ignored, or explained away by evidence clearly showing that animals communicated with each other; as if to communicate were the same as to speak. My object in my lectures (published at the time in _Longman’s Magazine_) was to show that no such transition from _pooh-pooh_ to _I despise_ is possible; nay, that even