I returned from Greytown and the waters of the San Juan to St. Thomas, spending a few days at Aspinwall and Panama on my journey, as I have before explained; and on this occasion, that of my fourth visit to St. Thomas, I was happy enough to escape without any long stay there. My course now lay to the Bermudas, to which islands a steamer runs once a month from that disagreeable little depot of steam navigation. But as this boat is fitted to certain arrivals and despatches, not at St. Thomas, but at Halifax, and as we reached St. Thomas late on the night of the day on which she should have sailed, and as my missing that vessel would have entailed on me another month's sojourn, and that a summer month, among those islands, it may be imagined that I was rather lively on entering the harbour; — keenly lively to ascertain whether the 'Delta,' such is the name of the Bermuda boat, was or was not gone on her mission.
Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we rarely pause to define it. It seems as natural to man as walking, and only less so than breathing. Yet it needs but a moment’s reflection to convince us that this naturalness of speech is but an illusory feeling. The process of acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing from the process of learning to walk… One theory is that primitive words were imitative of sounds: man copied the barking of dogs and thereby obtained a natural word with the meaning of ‘dog’ or ‘bark.’ To this theory, nicknamed the bow-wow theory, Renan objects that it seems rather absurd to set up this chronological sequence: first the lower animals are original enough to cry and roar; and then comes man, making a language for himself by imitating his inferiors. But surely man would imitate not only the cries of inferior animals, but also those of his fellow-men, and the salient point of the theory is this: sounds whic
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