It may, of course, be said that these mimic sounds are in part learnt from the traditional vocabulary of the nursery, in which the nurse takes good care to instruct the child. But it is to be remembered that the traditional nursery language itself is largely an adoption of children’s own sounds. There is, moreover, ample independent evidence to show that children are zealous and indefatigable imitators of the sounds they hear as of the movements they see. Towards the end of the first six months and during the second half-year a child is apt to imitate eagerly any sound you choose to produce before him. In the case of Preyer’s boy this impulse to repeat the sounds he heard developed into a kind of echoing mania. The acquisition of others’ language plainly depends on the existence and the vigour of this mimetic impulse. And this same impulse leads the child beyond the servile adoption of our conventional sounds to the invention of new or onomatopoetic sounds. Thus one little child discovered the pretty sound ‘tin-tin’ as a name for the bell. Another child, a girl, quite unprompted, used a chirping sound for a bird, and a curious clicking noise on seeing the picture of a horse (no doubt in imitation of the sound of a horse’s hoofs); while a little boy used a faint whistle to indicate a bird, and the sound ‘click-click’ to denote a horse. In some cases a grown-up person’s imitation of a sound is imitated. Thus a child of about two used the sound ‘afta’ as a name for drinking, and also for drinking-vessel, “in imitation of the sound of sucking in air which the nurse used to make when _pretending to drink_”.[70] ----- Footnote 70: Quoted by Romanes, _Mental Evolution in Man_, p. 143. ----- In these two sources of original child-language, expression of states of feeling, desire, etc., and imitation, we have the two commonly assigned origins of human language. Into the difficult question how man first came to the use of language-sounds I do not propose to enter here. Whatever view may be taken with respect to the first beginnings of human speech, there seems little doubt that both expressive cries and imitations of natural sounds have had their place. To this extent, then, we may say that there is a parallelism between the early evolution of language in the case of the individual and in that of the race. Not only so, it may be said that our study of these tentatives of the child in language-formation tends to confirm the conclusions of philology and anthropology that the current of human speech did probably originate, in main part at least, by way of these two tributaries.[71] ----- Footnote 71: