Scholars and literary men have taxed the resources of all the treasures of their imagination in endeavouring to picture the beginnings of language; in the present day many efforts are made by learned men to discover, from nurses surrounded by their charges, how the first words were reproduced by primitive man. It would be as useful to study the nature of primitive rocks amongst a mass of bricks and mortar, since the chasm is wide between the thoughts which our little ones have when they first begin to speak and those which primitive man had in trying to name his surroundings. We who speak because we know point out father or mother to a little child, naming them at the same time--“this is mother,” “this is father;” by degrees attributes become connected in the child’s mind with these names; such as mother’s hair, or her dress; or father’s beard, his pin; and whilst naming them we again point them out; and when the child pronounces these words in its own fashion, that is incorrectly, is this defect in pronunciation to be a sign-post to us--pointing out the direction to be followed in judging of primitive language? At a later period the child distinguishes between the mother’s smile and the father’s voice; later still its mind comprehends all the moral and physical attributes covered by these two terms; and thus with all other objects--“here is the cow,” and “here is the piece of sugar,” which so soon become familiar to the child, with their cognate words, milk and sweetness. Our children thus learn to speak under very different conditions from those in which our first ancestors found themselves, when with no previous experience they tried to put forth their first words. Conjectures increased and developed into systems, which, however, contained nothing beyond germs of fresh conjectures and fresh systems, of which none rested on a reasonable basis.