language is in man. The first attempts to sing may be compared to the
imperfect endeavour in a child to babble. The young males continue
practising, or as the bird-catchers say, recording, for ten or eleven
months. Their first essays shew hardly a rudiment of the future song;
but as they grow older we can perceive what they are aiming at; and at
last they are said to sing their song round. Nestlings which have
learnt the song of a distinct species, as with the canary-birds
educated in the Tyrol, teach and transmit their new song to their
offspring. The slight natural differences of song in the same species
inhabiting different districts may be appositely compared, as
Barrington remarks, to provincial dialects ; and the songs of allied,
though distinct species may be compared with the languages of distinct
races of man. I have given the foregoing details to shew that an
instinctive tendency to acquire an art is not peculiar to man.
With respect to the origin of articulate language, after having read on
the one side the highly interesting works of Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood,
the Rev. F. Farrar, and Prof. Schleicher (55. On the Origin of
Language, by H. Wedgwood, 1866. Chapters on Language, by the Rev.
F.W. Farrar, 1865. These works are most interesting. See also De la
Phys. et de Parole, par Albert Lemoine, 1865, p. 190. The work on this
subject, by the late Prof. Aug. Schleicher, has been translated by Dr.
Bikkers into English, under the title of Darwinism tested by the
Science of Language, 1869.), and the celebrated lectures of Prof. Max
Muller on the other side, I cannot doubt that language owes its origin
to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices
of other animals, and man s own instinctive cries, aided by signs and
gestures. When we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval
man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his
voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do
some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a
widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially
exerted during the courtship of the sexes, would have expressed various
emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph, and would have served as a
challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of
musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words
expressive of various complex emotions. The strong tendency in our
nearest allies, the monkeys, in microcephalous idiots (56. Vogt,
Memoire sur les Microcephales, 1867, p. 169. With respect to savages,
I have given some facts in my Journal of Researches, etc., 1845, p.
99