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Our belief thus arrived at—viz., that language was an achievement of the human genius which God implanted in the primeval man, a development of the faculty with which he endowed our race—does not at all necessitate the belief in a period when man was unable to communicate with man. The exercise of the faculty may have been rapid in that young and noble nature to a degree which now we cannot even conceive. A few imitative roots, uttered under the guidance of a divine instinct, and aided by the play of intelligence in movement and feature, would with wonderful ease grow into a language sufficient for the needs of a nascent humanity, and the living germ would soon bud and bourgeon by the very law of its production. Even if we were compelled to believe that this language was at first of the scantiest character, we see in this supposition nothing more absurd than in the certainty that knowledge and science, philosophy and art, are the slow, gradual, and toilsome conquests of an ever progressive race. It is now well understood that even the use of the senses has to be learnt,—that it is only by practice that we are able to discriminate distances in the variously-coloured surface which is all that we really see. Why should it then be unnatural to suppose that speech also was at first only implicitly bestowed on us, and that it required time and experience to develop fully the implanted capacity?