We have no wish to expel the terms instinct and instinctive from our popular diction, even when applied to human actions. There are cases when men act with a suddenness and decision which remind us of the animal in his promptest moods, and we naturally apply to these the term instinctive; and sometimes we apply the term to a tendency or desire which we cannot at the time trace to our senses, or to the usual operations of the mind. But when an author formally—in the very titles of his chapters—supplies us with “Promethean and maritime instincts,” we may be excused if we ask for some precise definition of the term. “_Speech_ is one of the instincts of man, but it is by the voluntary exercise of his intellectual faculties, as we conceive, that he is enabled to develop it into _language_.” This sounds oracular, but, like most oracles, it is very obscure. What does Mr Wilson mean by speech as contrasted with language? Is speech the mere giving of names to things, and language the formation of a grammar? But grammar is only a naming of a more complex kind, a naming of things and events in their more complicated relations. And what speech was ever formed that had not some grammar, that was not also a language? If by speech, in contrast to language, is meant the mere utterance of articulate sounds which have no meaning attached to them, then what proof have we that men ever passed through a stage of unmeaning gibberish? or could anything so purposeless be dignified with the name of an instinct? The _desire_ to speak, or to communicate our thoughts or our wants, is sometimes spoken of as an instinct. But the need man has of co-operation, and the ability he has to co-operate, and those general sympathies and affections which render him a social being, are sufficient to explain this desire. Such a desire may be contemplated as existing apart and prior to the possession of language, but there can be no reason for applying the term instinct to it, unless we apply that term to all our desires. So strong and inevitable is this desire to express our thoughts, that we have not the least doubt that, if the human larynx had not been fitted for speech, man would have invented a language of signs. His hands and feet would have talked, if his tongue and palate did not. His larynx being mute and all other faculties remaining the same, he would have talked with his fingers and written as the Chinese write, whose characters are signs for things, not for words.