In the first place, it appears to me that those experts have an overwhelmingly strong case who argue in favour of the polysynthetic languages as presenting a highly primitive form of speech. Indeed, so undifferentiated do I think they prove this type of language-structure to be, that I agree with them in concluding that it probably brings us nearer “the origin of speech” than any other type now extant. Furthermore, looking to the wide contrast between this type and that which is presented by the isolating tongues, it appears to me impossible that the one can be genetically connected with the other. For it appears to me that the experts on the opposite side have no less completely proved, that the isolating tongues also present evidence of a highly primitive origin; and, therefore, that whatever amount of evolution and subsequent degeneration (“phonetic decay”) the Chinese language, for instance, may be proved to have undergone, this only goes to show that it has throughout remained true to the isolating principle—just as the Protozoa, through all their long history of evolution, have remained true to _their_ “isolating” type, notwithstanding that some of their branches must long ago have given origin to the “agglutinated” Metazoa. In other words, it appears to me that the experts on this side of the question have been able to place the isolating type of speech on as low a level of development—and, therefore, presumably on as high a level of antiquity—as experts on the other side have been able to claim for the polysynthetic. If I am right in this opinion, it follows that there must have been at least two points of origin from which all existing languages arose—or rather, let me say, at least two types of language-formation upon which the earliest materials of speech were moulded. For even the strongest advocates of the polysynthetic origin of speech do not venture to question the highly primitive nature of the monosyllabic type. Thus, for instance, Professor Sayce is the principal upholder of the polysynthetic view, and yet he quotes the isolating forms of Chinese and Taic as furnishing “excellent illustrations of the early days of speech;”[159] and he adduces them as “examples from the far East to show us the way in which our words first came into existence.”[160] But if this is allowed to be so even by the leading advocate of the polysynthetic view, I cannot conceive the possibility of the one type having become so completely transformed into the other as to have left no trace in the isolating type of its polysynthetic origin. For, in view of the above admissions, we are left to conclude that the transformation must have taken place soon after the birth of language in any form—notwithstanding that, as Professor Sayce elsewhere insists (in the passage already quoted), “the conception of the sentence which underlies the polysynthetic dialects is the precise converse of that which underlies the isolating or the agglutinative type.”