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The lack of reflection shown in the building up of these hypotheses concerning the commencement of humanity has been severely criticised, and that they were very superficial must be conceded. It is equally clear that all these tentative efforts had this in common, that they were the results of the influence on immature minds of the period, of the necessity of explaining the awakening of human reason in a rational manner.

The search was continued. At last the nineteenth century considered that a solution had been found. Certain ideas which had received attention during divers periods were now collected, sorted, re-examined more closely, and classified, and from these labours there arose the two theories of interjection and imitation. According to the first, language consists of sounds drawn involuntarily from man by his emotions and feelings; by degrees man became accustomed to reproduce similar exclamations when wishing to express the same feelings, and these exclamations would serve as the roots of words; this is the interjectional theory. The imitative or onomatopœic proceeds from another source; when man was confronted by all the objects of the exterior world he began to imitate the sounds emitted, such as the cries of various animals, the whistling of the wind, the fall of a stone; the many sounds which fill the air were reproduced by the human voice and formed the basis for future words. Objections to both of these theories are not lacking. If emotions such as joy, pain, anger, love, disgust—or if physical sensations such as result from the sting of a bee or from a blow of the fist, could furnish the roots of a language, and if it were the same with the imitation of noises produced by nature, the sounds of the words should retain a definite impress of these emotions and feelings, and should reproduce, if only approximately, these various noises. Even if we admit that a small number of primitive men set themselves to imitate the murmur of the stream, the rolling of the thunder, the barking of a dog, the groans of the wounded, the only result would have been infinite variations of clamour quite impossible to distinguish or to understand. Strictly speaking, the prolonged sound of “bée” and “mou” might awaken the conception of a goat and cow in the mind; but in order to convey the idea of a herd of oxen it would be necessary to avoid equally the sound of “bée” and “mou,” as belonging exclusively to the two special animals. The warbling notes of birds have always attracted attention, and essays have been made to reproduce them by imitative harmony, but the various peoples have given various interpretations,[2] and in the generality of cases there is no resemblance between the names of animals and their cries.[3] After examining the testimony of the name “cuckoo” (no doubt convincing taken by itself), which is the prominent argument brought forward by the advocates of the imitative theory called by Max Müller the bow-wow theory, we are not able to advance further in that direction. Darwin in his book, The Descent of Man, promulgates the idea that language may have originated from interjections and imitations, but elsewhere in the Expressions of the Emotions he hastens to add with his accustomed frankness: “But the whole subject of the differences of the sounds produced under different states of the mind is so obscure that I have succeeded in throwing hardly any light on it; and the remarks which I have made have but little significance.”[4]