the half-human creature now before our imagination would probably have struck us as a wonderful adept at making significant sounds and movements both as to number and variety; but in all probability we should scarcely have been able to notice the already-developing germ of articulation. Nor do I believe that, if we were able to strike in again upon the history thousands of years later, we should find that pantomime had been superseded by speech. On the contrary, I believe we should find that although considerable progress had been made in the former, so that the object then before us might appear deserving of being classed as _Homo_, we should also feel that he must needs still be distinguished by the addition _alalus_. Lastly, I believe that this most interesting creature probably lived for an inconceivably long time before his faculty of articulate sign-making had developed sufficiently far to begin to starve out the more primitive and more natural systems; and I believe that, even after this starving-out process did begin, another inconceivable lapse of time must have been required for such progress to have eventually transformed _Homo alalus_ into _Homo sapiens_. * * * * * It is now time to consider a branch of this hypothesis which has been suggested by the philologist Professor Noiré, to which allusion has already been made in an earlier chapter.[326] Before Mr. Darwin had published his views, Professor Noiré had elaborated a theory of the origin of speech which was substantially the same as that which I have already quoted from the _Descent of Man_.[327] The only difference between the two was that, while Darwin referred the origin of articulate speech from instinctive cries, &c., to the anthropoid apes, Noiré referred it to a being already human. In other words, Noiré adopted what I have here called the third hypothesis, which assumes a speechless form of man as anterior to the existing form.[328] But, as a result of further deliberation, Noiré came to the conclusion that “the objects of fear and trembling and dismay are even now the least appropriate to enter into the pure, clear, and tranquil sphere of speech-thought, or to supply the first germs of it.” Accordingly, he discarded the view that these germs were to be sought in instinctive cries and danger calls, in favour of the hypothesis that articulation had its origin in sounds which are made by bodies of men when engaged in common occupations. Having already explained the elements of this Yo-he-ho theory, it will here be enough to repeat that I think there is probably some measure of truth in it; although I likewise think it self-evident that this cannot have been the only source of aboriginal speech. In what proportion this branch of onomatopœia was concerned in the genesis of aboriginal words—supposing it to have been concerned at all—we have now no means of even conjecturing. But seeing that there are so many other sources