By some eminent men of letters it is claimed that speech was invented, and therefore cannot be universally the same; and this is proven by the fact that different tribes of men have different tongues. They do not appear to realise, that to the first cardinal sounds of speech so much has been added age by age, by slow accretions, that the radex of speech is but a mere drop in the great ocean of sounds. The mobility of speech is such as to make it more susceptible to change than matter is; and yet we find that, by the laws of change, man has been evolved from a less complex state of matter, and that in these latter years he can only be identified as the descendant of his prototype by the most scrutinising care, and by picking up the dropped stitches in the great fabric of Nature. To illustrate the slow and imperceptible, yet never ceasing, never failing process of evolution, we may imagine a man picking up a single grain of sand at a certain point and carrying it a distance of a thousand feet, where he deposits it at another certain point; returning, takes a second grain of sand from the same place as he secured the first, and carries it to the point at which he deposited the first, and thus continues through his life. At his death his son succeeds him in the task, and continues through his life, and at the death of this man his son succeeds; and thus in turn each one succeeds the other through a million generations. Supposing the wind and rain left these grains of sand unmolested during this long lapse of time, it is evident that at the place from which the sand was taken there would be a hole, and where it was deposited there would be a hill. It is by such slight changes that Nature does her work; and thus it is that speech, as well as matter, has been transformed from what it was to what it is. The physical basis of life retains its identity through all those varied forms, from protozoa to the highest type; and so the phonetic basis of speech adheres through all the changing modes of thought and expression. Speech is the highest type of language and the most accurate mode of expression, and belongs only to the higher forms of the animal kingdom. It has passed through all inferior horizons coinciding with the mental, moral, and social planes through which man has passed in the course of his evolution. [Sidenote: SPEECH AND WORDS]