I see no escape from the conclusions that the chief distinctions of race were established long before man acquired language. If the statement made by M. de Mortillet is true, that the absence of the mental tubercle, or bony excrescence in which the tongue is inserted, in a skull of the Neanderthal type found at La Naulette, indicates an absence of the faculty of speech, one race at least of palæolithic man would have existed in Europe before it had as yet invented an articulate language. Indeed it is difficult to believe that man has known how to speak for any very great length of time. * * * We can still trace through the thin disguise of subsequent modifications and growth the elements, both lexical and grammatical, out of which language must have arisen. * * * The beginnings of articulate language are still too transparent to allow us to refer them to a very remote era. * * * In fact the evidence that he is a drawing animal * * * mounts back to a much earlier epoch than the evidence that he is a speaking animal. When a system of ideographic gesture signs prevailed and at the same time any form of artistic representation, however rude, existed, it would be expected that the delineations of the former would appear in the latter. It was but one more and an easy step to fasten upon bark, skins, or rocks the evanescent air pictures that still in pigments or carvings preserve their ideography or conventionalism in their original outlines. A transition stage between gestures and pictographs, in which the left hand is used as a supposed drafting surface, upon which the index draws lines, is exhibited in the Dialogue between Alaskan Indians in the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (_a_). This device is common among deaf-mutes, without equal archeologic importance, as it may have been suggested by the art of writing, with which, even when not instructed in it, they are generally acquainted. The execution of the drawings, of which the several forms of picture-writing are composed, often exhibits the first crude efforts of graphic art, and their study in that relation is of value. When pictures are employed for the same purpose as writing, the conception intended to be presented is generally analyzed and only its most essential points are indicated, with the result that the characters when frequently repeated become conventional, and in their later form cease to be recognizable as objective portraitures. This exhibition of conventionalizing has its own historic import.