But this carries us back a very little way. Judging by philology alone, the Chinese, whose annals go back only to about 2500 B.C., would be an older race than the Egyptians or Accadians, whose languages can be traced at least 2000 years further back. And if we go back into prehistoric and geological times we are absolutely ignorant whether the neolithic and palæolithic races spoke these languages, or indeed spoke at all. Some palæontologists have fancied that there was evidence for some of the older palæolithic races being speechless, and christened them "Homo alalus," but this is based on the solitary fact that a single human jaw, that of Naulette, is wanting in the genial tubercle, absent also in anthropoid apes, to which one of the muscles of the tongue is attached. But apart from this being a single instance, some of the best anatomists deny that this genial tubercle is really essential to speech, which the latest physiological researches show to be dependent on the development of a small tract in the third frontal convolution of the right side of the brain, any injury to which causes aphasia, or loss of the power of speech, though its physical organs of the larynx remain unimpaired. It is probable, however, that from the very first man had a certain faculty, like other animals, of expressing meaning by sounds and gestures, and the researches of Romanes, and quite recently those of Professor Garner on the language of monkeys and apes, make this almost certain. But at what particular moment in the course of the evolution of man this faculty ripened into what may be properly called language is a matter of the purest conjecture. It may have been in the Tertiary, the Quaternary, or not until the Recent period.