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The belief that language was innate led to the strange hallucination that if a child were entirely secluded from human contact, he would speak instinctively the primitive language of mankind. According to Herodotus, the experiment was actually made by Psammetichus, King of Egypt, who entrusted two new-born infants to a shepherd, with the injunction to let them suck a goat’s milk, and to speak no words in their presence, but to observe what word they would first utter. After two years the shepherd visited them, and they approached him, stretching[15] out their hands, and uttering the word βεκός. It was found that this vocable existed in the Phrygian language, and meant “bread;” whence it was sagely inferred that the Phrygians spoke the original language, and were the most ancient of people. There is in this story such a delicious naïveté, that one could hardly expect that it would have happened in any except very early ages. It can, however, be paralleled by the popular opinion which attributed the same experiment to James IV. and Frederic II.[16] in the Middle Ages. In the latter case the little unfortunates died for want of lullabies! Similarly, almost every nation has regarded its own language as the primitive one. One of the historians of St. Louis says that a deaf mute, miraculously healed at the king’s tomb, spoke, not in the language of Burgundy, where he was born, but in the language[17] of the capital. A similar belief seems to underlie the extreme anxiety and curiosity of savages to learn the name of any article hitherto unknown to them, as though the name had some absolute significance. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of that deep germ of truth which such fancies involve; but hints of it may be found in Holy[18] Scripture.