After all that Mr. Darwin has written, does or can any reasonable man or woman actually believe in the possibility,--_apart from the Divine Power and Will and Guidance_,--for that is the point,--of the self-development, the spontaneous upgrowth of articulate language? Let us study our quadrupedal familiars, for the sake of illustration and analogy. We see daily how our noble dogs strain and groan after speech, do all but speak: we mark their eloquent looks, their speaking gestures, their wonderfully expressive movements, how they watch us speak, and seem as if they understood what speech is to us, and as if they craved most longingly the power for themselves. We cannot but sympathetically admire the intelligent, the benevolent, the noble, the sagacious physiognomies which they show. If any creature ever could, would, or did develop speech in any rudimentary form, are not they just in the circumstances to do it? And when once rudimentally begun, however uncouthly and imperfectly, should not their organs continually improve by the continual effort and the increasing intelligence? Is it not immensely less hard of belief, and less difficult to imagine, that dogs should develop speech, than that man should have been developed from the larvæ of the _ascidiæ_? Yet is there even a beginning made towards the canine development of articulate language, or does any living man believe that such a beginning ever could be made? To me it appears that human speech and human personality are in some way bound up with each other, that the one, in some sort, implies the other, and that these two characteristics of our race present an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance by really scientific thinkers of any hypothesis of evolution which, leaving God out of nature, would account for the whole existence and progress of the universe on the principle of spontaneous development.