This, as I have previously observed, is merely a quibble. If originally every root was “something real, something used in conversation,” originally all roots were _words_, in just the same sense as “the monosyllabic expressions of children” are words. And if “nearly all these roots express the acts of man,” while most (if not all) the outstanding residuum were apparently expressive of states, it follows that the roots in question were not only words, but _verbs_. And in stating this “fact” I supposed that I was but following Prof. Max Müller’s statement of it, where he constitutes it the philological basis of his theory on the “origin of roots”—viz. that all roots sprang from sounds made by “primitive social man” when engaged in their “social _acts_.” But, while accepting this fact, I objected to the theory raised upon it, because the latter did not consider that roots which originally had the force of verbs must have been more likely to have survived, and so to have come down to us, than those which may originally have had the significance of any other parts of speech. And it was only in order to supply this further consideration that I alluded to the “fact” at all. * * * * * We come next to some disparaging remarks upon “babies,” “parrots,” and the lower animals generally (_The Monist_, pp. 586-7). Prof. Max Müller “refuses to argue” with me, “or any other philosopher, either in the nursery or the menagerie.” So be it. As a philologist, of course, he is assuredly right; no one would expect him so to argue. But as a philosopher, who has written a large book on the “Science of Thought,” he is no less assuredly wrong. And one may be pardoned for wondering at this intentionally ostrich-like attitude on the part of a philosopher—who is “going beyond the origin of roots”—with respect to the fundamental germs of the sign-making faculty.