It will be easily understood that nothing would penetrate more deeply into man’s consciousness, or produce mutual understanding more readily, than acts undertaken and accomplished with the same end in view by a number of men united in a common impulse. During the digging of the caves, the weaving of the nets, the thrashing of the grain, the workers would follow with their eyes the gradual transformation perceptible in these activities, and the sounds which they emitted, or the half-formed words issuing from their lips would be modified or softened at each development in the work; these developments becoming more and more distinct, more and more impressed with their own special characteristic. The idea of individuality must have been very clouded, very confused amongst primitive man; that which one saw the other saw after the same manner; they designed each object in creating it; in this way the world became as a book to them, this book, the result of their combined labour, they learnt to read fluently by means of these sounds and words which increased as they varied. Thus work--man’s good genius--is proved to be the source of what is truly human, viz., reason and language. Here I will note a curious fact and one which is historical. At a period when writing was unknown in India, the Brahmans had already established the rules of poetical metre, which were originally connected with dancing and music. These rules had been preserved in the Veda. The various Sanscrit names for metre are a witness of the union of corporal and phonetic movements. The root of _Khandas_, metre, is the same as the Latin _scandere_ in the sense of stepping; _vritta_, metre, from _vrit_, verto--to turn, meant originally the last three or four steps of a dancing movement, the turn, the _versus_, which determined the whole character of dance or of the metre. _Trishtubh_, the name of a common metre in the Veda, meant three-step, because its turn--its _vritta_ or _versus_--consisted of three steps, ∪ - -. Thus the innate necessity that man feels of linking the play of the vocal chords to the movement of hands or feet, had been controlled by fixed laws, twenty-four centuries ago, by the Hindoo grammarians; and the most recent theories of modern writers on the subject attest the excellence of these laws. The assertion that it is natural to peasants not to keep silence when working is of very ancient date, but Noiré was the first to deduce scientific data from the fact.