Let us next notice that the recognition of likeness and unlikeness, which underlies classification, and out of which continued classification evolves the idea of complete likeness--let us next notice that it also underlies the process of _naming_, and by consequence _language_. For all language consists, at the beginning, of symbols which are as _like_ to the things symbolized as it is practicable to make them. The language of signs is a means of conveying ideas by mimicking the actions or peculiarities of the things referred to. Verbal language is also, at the beginning, a mode of suggesting objects or acts by imitating the sounds which the objects make, or with which the acts are accompanied. Originally these two languages were used simultaneously. It needs but to watch the gesticulations with which the savage accompanies his speech--to see a Bushman or a Kaffir dramatizing before an audience his mode of catching game--or to note the extreme paucity of words in all primitive vocabularies; to infer that at first, attitudes, gestures, and sounds, were all combined to produce as good a _likeness_ as possible, of the things, animals, persons, or events described; and that as the sounds came to be understood by themselves the gestures fell into disuse: leaving traces, however, in the manners of the more excitable civilized races. But be this as it may, it suffices simply to observe, how many of the words current among barbarous peoples are like the sounds appertaining to the things signified; how many of our own oldest and simplest words have the same peculiarity; how children tend to invent imitative words; and how the sign-language spontaneously formed by deaf mutes is invariably based upon imitative actions--to at once see that the notion of _likeness_ is that from which the nomenclature of objects takes its rise. Were there space we might go on to point out how this law of life is traceable, not only in the origin but in the development of language; how in primitive tongues the plural is made by a duplication of the singular, which is a multiplication of the word to make it _like_ the multiplicity of the things; how the use of metaphor--that prolific source of new words--is a suggesting of ideas that are _like_ the ideas to be conveyed in some respect or other; and how, in the copious use of simile, fable, and allegory among uncivilized races, we see that complex conceptions, which there is yet no direct language for, are rendered, by presenting known conceptions more or less _like_ them.