Indeed, if we consider the matter, it is not conceivable that the case could be otherwise. No one will maintain that the sentence-words of young children exhibit the highest elaborations of conceptual thought, on the ground that they present the highest degree of “generality” which it is possible for articulate sounds to express. But if this is not to be suggested as regards the infant child, what possible ground can there be for suggesting it as regards the infant man, or for inferring that aboriginal speech must have been expressive of “general” and “abstract” ideas, merely because the further backwards that we trace the growth of language the less organized do we find its structure to be? Clearly, the contradiction arises from a confusion between ideas as generic and general, or between the extension which is due to original vagueness and that which is laboriously acquired by subsequent precision. An Amœba is morphologically more “generalized” than a Vertebrate; but for this very reason it is the less highly evolved as an organism. The philology of sentence-words, therefore, leads us back to a state of ideation wherein as yet the powers of conceptual thought were in that nascent condition which betokens what I have called their pre-conceptual stage—or a stage which may be observed in a comparatively foreshortened state among children before the dawn of self-consciousness. There can be no reasonable doubt that during this stage of mental evolution sentence-words arose in the race as they now do in the individual, the only difference being that then they had to be invented instead of learnt. This difference would probably have given a larger importance to the principle of onomatopœia,[270] and certainly a much larger importance to the co-operation of gesture, than now obtains in the otherwise analogous case of young children. But in the one case as in the other, I think there can be no reasonable question that sentence-words must have owed their origin to receptual and pre-conceptual apprehensions of all kinds, whether of objects, qualities, actions, states, relations, or of any two or more of these “categories” as they may happen to have been blended in the hitherto undifferentiating perceptions of aboriginal man. * * * * *