The evolution of speech, starting from the protoplasmic state without organs or functions, and acquiring them little by little, proceeding progressively from indefinite to definite, from fluid to fixed state, can only be sketched in free outline. In details it falls within neither our subject nor our cognisance. But the successive points of this differentiation, which creates grammatical forms, and parts of discourse, are under an objective form the history of the development of intelligence, inasmuch as it abstracts, generalises, analyses, and tends towards an ever-growing precision. The completely developed languages—and we are speaking only of such—bear throughout the print of the unconscious labor that has fashioned them for centuries: they are a petrified psychology. We must return to the roots or primitive terms, whatever may be their nature. Two distinct categories are generally admitted: pronominal or demonstrative roots, verbal or predicative roots. The first form a small group that properly indicate rather the relative position of the speaker, than any concrete quality. They are equivalent to here, there, this, that, etc. They are few in number, and very simple in their phonetic relations: a vowel or vowel followed by a consonant. Many linguists refuse to admit them as roots, and think they have dropped from the second class by attenuation of meaning.[58] Possibly they are a survival of gesture language. The second (verbal or predicative) is the only class that interests us. These have swarmed in abundance. They indicate qualities or actions; that is the important point. The first words denominated attributes or modes of being; they were adjectives, at least in the measure in which a fixed and rigid terminology can be applied to states in process of forming. Primitive man was everywhere struck with the qualities of things, _ergo_ words were all originally appellative. They expressed one of the numerous characteristics of each object; they translated a spontaneous and natural _abstraction_: another proof of the precocious and indispensable nature of this operation. From its earliest developments intelligence has tended to simplify, to substitute the part for the whole. The unconscious choice of one attribute among many others depends on various causes; doubtless on its predominance, but above all on the interest it has for man. “A people,” remarks Renan, “have usually many words for what most interests them.” Thus, in Hebrew, we find 25 synonyms for the observance of the law; 14 for faith in God; 11 for rain, etc. In Arabic, the lion has 500 names, the serpent 200, money more than 80; the camel has 5,744, the sword 1,000 as befits a warrior race. The Lapp whose language is so poor, has more than 30 words to designate the reindeer, an animal indispensable to his life.[59] These so-called synonyms each denominate a particular aspect of things; they witness to the abundance of primitive abstractions.