This evidence consists merely in fact that the “121 original concepts,” which are embodied in the roots of Aryan speech, are expressive of “general ideas.” Now, this argument might be worth considering if there were the smallest reason to suppose that in these roots of Aryan speech we possess the aboriginal elements of language as first spoken by man. But as we well know that this is immeasurably far from being the case, the whole argument collapses. The mere fact that many words which have survived as roots are words expressive of general ideas, is no more than we might have antecedently expected. Remembering that it is a favourable condition to a word surviving as a root that it should prove itself a prolific parent of other words, obviously it is those words which were expressive of ideas presenting some degree of generality that would have had the best chance of thus coming down to us, even from the comparatively high level of culture which, as we have seen, is testified to by “the 121 original concepts.” Of course, as I have already said, the case would have been different if any one were free to suppose, even as a merely logical possibility, that this level of culture represented that of primitive man when he first began to employ articulate speech. But any such supposition is beyond the range of rational discussion. The 121 concepts themselves yield overwhelming evidence of belonging to a time _immeasurably remote_ from that of any speechless progenitor of _Homo sapiens_; and in the enormous interval (whatever it may have been) many successive generations of words must _certainly_ have flourished and died.[190]