fully seen, no such unique exception to the otherwise uniform process of evolution can here be maintained: the phases of development which have gradually led up to conceptual thought admit of being as clearly traced as those which have led to any other product, whether of life or of mind. Here, then, I bring to a close this brief and imperfect rendering of the “Witness of Philology.” But, brief and imperfect as the rendering is, I am honestly unable to see how it is conceivable that the witness itself could have been more uniform as to its testimony, or more multifarious as to its facts—more consistent, more complete, or more altogether overwhelming than we have found it to be. In almost every single respect it has corroborated the results of our psychological analysis. It has come forward like a living thing, which, in the very voice of Language itself, directly and circumstantially narrates to us the actual history of a process the constituent phases of which we had previously inferred. It has told us of a time when as yet mankind were altogether speechless, and able to communicate with one another only by means of gesticulation and grimace. It has described to us the first articulate sounds in the form of sentence-words, without significance apart from the pointings by which they were accompanied. It has revealed the gradual differentiation of such a protoplasmic form of language into “parts of speech;” and declared that these grammatical structures were originally the offspring of gesture-signs. More particularly, it has shown that in the earliest stages of articulate utterance pronominal elements, and even predicative words, were used in the impersonal manner which belongs to a hitherto undeveloped form of self-consciousness—primitive man, like a young child, having therefore spoken of his own personality in objective terminology. It has taught us to find in the body of every conceptual term a pre-conceptual core; so that, as the learned and thoughtful Garnett says, “_nihil in oratione quod non prius in sensu_ may now be regarded as an incontrovertible axiom.”[298] It has minutely described the whole of that wonderful aftergrowth of articulate utterance through many lines of divergent evolution, in virtue of which all nations of the earth are now in possession, in one degree or another, of the god-like attributes of reason and of speech. Truly, as Archdeacon Farrar says, “to the flippant and the ignorant, how ridiculous is the apparent inadequacy of the origin to produce such a result.”[299] But here, as elsewhere, it is the method of evolution to bring to nought the things that are mighty by the things that are of no reputation; and when we feel disposed to boast ourselves in that we alone may claim the Logos, should we not do well to pause and remember in what it was that this our high prerogative arose? “So hat auch keine Sprache ein abstractum, zu dem sie nicht durch Ton und Gefühl gelangt wäre.”[300] To my mind