as
alone needed to produce it, and through that evolution man undoubtedly
passed in his progress upward from his ancestral stage.

The language of the lower animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks
the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this
man seems to have at first agreed with them. The infant begins its vocal
utterances with simple cries; only at a later age does it begin to
articulate. If we may judge from the development of language in the
child, man began to speak with the use of sounds native to the vocal
organs, and progressed by a process of imitation, endeavoring to
reproduce the sounds heard around him: the voices of animals, the sounds
of nature, etc. This tendency to imitate is not peculiar to man. It
exists in many birds, and in some attains a marked development. The
mocking bird, for instance, has an extraordinary flexibility of the
vocal organs and power of imitating the voices of other birds. The
parrot and some other birds go farther in this direction, being capable
of using articulate language and clearly repeating words used by man.

None of the mammalia possess this facility. It is not found in the apes,
and probably was not possessed by the ancestor of man. But it is not
difficult to believe that in the efforts of the latter to gain a greater
variety of vocal utterance, its organs of speech became more flexible,
and in time it gained the power of articulation.

There are races of existing men whose powers of language seem still in
the transition stage between articulate and inarticulate speech. This
seems the case with the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa, whose
vocal utterances consist largely of a series of peculiar clicks that are
certainly not articulate speech, though on the road toward it. The
Pygmies of the Central African forests seem similarly to occupy an
intermediate position in the development of language. Those who have
endeavored to talk with them speak of their utterance as being
inarticulate in sound. It appears to be a sort of link between