The Dawn of History An Introduction to Pre Historic Study

arliest inhabitants of our globe ? Foremost among these, long anterior to the " metallurgic and other manufacturing skill,'''' comes language. With us, to whom thought and speech are so bound together as to be almost inseparable, the idea that language is an instrument which through long ages has been slowly improved to its present perfection, seems difficult of credit. We think of early man having the same ideas and expressing them as readily as we do now; but this is not the case. Not, indeed, that we have any reason to believe that there was a time when man had no language at all, but it seems certain that long ages were necessary before this instrument could be wrought to the fineness in which we find it, and to which in all the languages we are likely to become acquainted with, we are accustomed. A rude iron knife or spear-head seems a simple and natural thing to make. But we know that before it could be made iron had to be discovered, and the art of extracting iron from the ore; and, as a matter of fact, we know that thousands of years passed before the iron spearhead was a possibility, thousands of years spent in slowly improving the weapons of stone, and passing on from them to the weapons of bronze. So, too, with language; simple as it seems at first sight to fit the word on to the idea, and earlyas we ourselves Jearn this art, a little thought about what language is will show us how much we owe to the ages which have gone before. To begin with, then, ...