So that this wondrous faculty of speech has, like those other faculties of which Carlyle speaks, been handed down on impalpable vehicles of sound through the ages. Never, perhaps, since the time of our first parents has one person from among the countless millions who have been born had to invent for himself a way of expressing his thoughts in words. This is alone a strange thing enough. Impossible as it is to imagine ourselves without speech, we may ask the question--What should we do if we were ever left in such a predicament? Should we have _any_ guide in fitting the sound on to the idea? _Share_ and _chère_, _feel_ and _viel_--among these unconnected notions is there _any_ reason why we should wed our speech to one rather than another? Clearly there is no reason. Yet in the case which we imagined of a number of rational beings who had to invent a language for the first time, if they are ever to come to an understanding at all there must be some common impulse which makes more than one choose the same sound for a particular idea. How, for instance, we may ask, was it with our first parents? They have passed on to all their descendants for ever the idea of conveying thought by sound, and all the great changes which have since come into the languages of the world have been gradual and, so to say, natural. But this first invention of the idea of speech is of quite another character. Here we are brought to the threshold of that impenetrable mystery ‘the beginning of things,’ and here we must pause. We recognize this faculty of speech as a thing mysterious, unaccountable, belonging to that supernatural being, man. There must, one would think, have been and must be in us a something which causes our mouth to echo the thought of the heart; and originally this echo must have been spontaneous and natural, the same for all alike. Now it is a mere matter of tradition and instruction, the sound we use for the idea; but at first the two must have had some subtle necessary connection, or how could one of our first parents have known or guessed what the other wished to say? Just as every metal has its peculiar ring, it is as though each impression on the mind rang out its peculiar word from the tongue.[17] Or was it like the faint tremulous sound which glasses give when music is played near? The outward object or the inward thought called out a sort of mimicry, a distant echo--not like, but yet born of the other--on the lips. These earliest sounds may perhaps still sometimes be detected. In the sound _flo_ or _flu_, which in an immense number of languages stands connected with the idea of flowing and of rivers, do we not recognize some attempt to catch the smooth yet rushing sound of water? And again, in the sound _gra_ or _gri_, which is largely associated with the notion of grinding, cutting, or scraping,[18] there is surely something of this in the guttural harshness of the letters, which make the tongue grate, as it