It will be remembered that, under my analysis of the growth of predication, much more stress has been laid in the last chapter than in previous chapters on what I have called the protoplasm of predication as this occurs in the hitherto undifferentiated “sentence-word.” While treating of the psychology of predication in the chapter on Speech, I did not go further back in my analysis than to point out how the “nascent” or “pre-conceptual” propositions of young children are brought about by the mere apposition of denotative terms—such apposition having been shown to be due to sensuous association when under the guidance of the “logic of events.” But when I came to deal with the philology of predication, it became evident that there was even an earlier phase of the faculty in question than that of apposing denotative terms by sensuous association. For, as we have so recently seen, philologists have proved that even before there were any denotative terms respectively significant of objects, qualities, actions, states, or relations, there were sentence-words which combined in one vague mass the meanings afterwards apportioned to substantives, adjectives, verbs, prepositions, &c., with the consequence that the only kind of apposition which could be called into play for the purpose of indicating the particular significance intended to belong to such a word on particular occasions, was the apposition of gesture-signs. Now, I had two reasons for thus postponing our consideration of what is undoubtedly the earliest phase of articulate sign-making. In the first place, it seemed to me that I might more easily lead the reader to a clear understanding of the subject by beginning with a phase of predication which he could most readily appreciate, than by suddenly bringing him into the presence of a germ-like origin which is far from being so readily intelligible. But over and above this desire to proceed from the familiar to the unfamiliar, I had, in the second place, a further and a better reason for not dealing with the ultimate germ of articulate sign-making so long as I was dealing only with the psychology of our subject. This reason was, that in the development of speech as exhibited by the growing child—which, of course, furnishes our only material for a study of the subject from a psychological point of view—the original or germinal phase in question does not appear to be either so marked, so important, or, comparatively speaking, of such prolonged duration as it was in the development of speech in the race. To use biological terms, this the earliest phase in the evolution of speech has been greatly foreshortened in the ontogeny of mankind, as compared with what it appears to have been in the phylogeny. The result, of course, is that we should gain but an inadequate idea of its importance, were we to estimate it by a merely psychological analysis of what we now find in the life-history of the individual.