Vestiges of the Natural History of CreationChambers, Robert
Science
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Chambers, Robert
Creation; Evolution (Biology)
see only a result of some of those superior endowments of which so many
others have fallen to our lot through the medium of an improved or
advanced organization.
The first and most obvious natural endowment concerned in speech is that
peculiar organization of the larynx, trachea, and mouth, which enables us
to produce the various sounds required in the case. Man started at first
with this organization ready for use, a constitution of the atmosphere
adapted for the sounds which that organization was calculated to produce,
and, lastly, but not leastly, as will afterwards be more particularly
shewn, a mental power within, prompting to, and giving directions for,
the expression of ideas. Such an arrangement of mutually adapted things
was as likely to produce sounds as an Eolian harp placed in a draught is
to produce tones. It was unavoidable that human beings so organized, and
in such a relation to external nature, should utter sounds, and also come
to attach to these conventional meanings, thus forming the elements of
spoken language. The great difficulty which has been felt was to account
for man going in this respect beyond the inferior animals. There could
have been no such difficulty if speculators in this class of subjects had
looked into physiology for an account of the superior vocal organization
of man, and had they possessed a true science of mind to shew man
possessing a faculty for the expression of ideas which is only rudimental
in the lower animals. Another difficulty has been in the consideration
that, if men were at first utterly untutored and barbarous, they could
scarcely be in a condition to form or employ language—an instrument which
it requires the fullest powers of thought to analyse and speculate upon.
But this difficulty also vanishes upon reflection—for, in the first
place, we are not bound to suppose the fathers of our race early
attaining to great proficiency in language, and, in the second, language
itself seems to be amongst the things least difficult to be acquired, if
we can form any judgment from what we see in children, most of whom have,
by three years of age, while their information and judgment are still as
nothing, mastered and familiarized themselves with a quantity of words,
infinitely exceeding in proportion what they acquire in the course of any
subsequent similar portion of time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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