But there is everywhere the same nature, everywhere things are alike. Life is unity; we do not share it one with another; both the life of the body and the life of intellect, both matter and the mind, and the organism and the faculties,[74] belong to each one separately. Terms correlative one to the other, never independent. There is an immense space between the intellect of animals and that of a civilised European; we willingly recognise this, but encumbered by mean terms and numerous transitions; that these latter exist, or that they have finished their time upon our planet, we also allow. The question of language, so confused, and so full of obscurity, still remains. “Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and the monkey,” says Buffon, “the distance which separates them is immense, since internally it is filled by thought and outwardly by speech.”[75] We know how to consider the first of these appreciations. As to the second, let us see if we shall not there perceive a sort of gradation which would insensibly lead us from our own complicated languages to others of a much greater simplicity, so much so that they can scarcely be called by that name. Speech and language are two words often confounded, but in science we must give to each of them its own value. _Speech_ is a language articulated by the respiratory channels. _Language_ may be defined as “everything spoken by well known and understood means between two intellects.” It may be seen that we give the fullest acceptation possible to this word. It is a _language_ that the Abbé de l’Epée invented for the deaf and dumb. The writing of this language is another. A phonetic telegram is, as regards a stranger, merely a succession of sounds, like the song of a nightingale; a naval telegram is only an assemblage and a combination of colours like an arabesque, united the moment when the necessary arrangement forms these sounds or these colours into language.[76]