But for our present purposes it is clearly a matter of no consequence that we should be able to classify all signs as natural or conventional. For it is certain that animals employ both; and hence no distinction between the brute and the man can be raised on the question of the kind of signs which they severally employ as natural or conventional. This distinction, therefore, may in future be disregarded, and natural and conventional signs, _if made intentionally as signs_, I shall consider as identical. For the sake of method, however, I shall treat the sign-making faculty as exhibited by man in the order of its probable evolution; and this means that I shall begin with the most natural, or least conventional, of the systems. This is the language of tone and gesture. CHAPTER VI. TONE AND GESTURE. Tone and Gesture, considered as means of communication, may be dealt with simultaneously. For while it cannot be said that either historically or psychologically one is prior to the other, no more can it be said that in the earliest phases of their development one is more expressive than the other. All the more intelligent of the lower animals employ both; and the hissings, spittings, growlings, screamings, gruntings, cooings, &c., which in different species accompany as many different kinds of gesture, are assuredly not less expressive of the various kinds of feelings which are expressed. Again, in our own species, tone is quite as general, and, within certain limits, quite as expressive as gesture. Nay, even in fully developed speech, rational meaning is largely dependent for its conveyance upon slight differences of intonation. The five hundred words which go to constitute the Chinese language are raised to three times that number by the use of significant intonation; and even in the most highly developed languages shades of meaning admit of being rendered in this way which could not be rendered in any other.