This wonderful discovery enabled the developing race to extend its habitat almost indefinitely, and to include flesh, and in particular fish, in its regular dietary. Man could now leave the forests and wander along the shores and rivers, migrating to climates less enervating than those to which he had previously been confined. Doubtless he became an expert fisher, but he was as yet poorly equipped for hunting.... Primitive races of Australia and Polynesia had not advanced beyond this middle status of savagery when they were discovered a few generations ago.
The next great ethnical discovery was that of the bow and arrow, a truly wonderful instrument.
The possessor of this device could bring down the fleetest animal and could defend himself against the most predatory. He could provide himself not only with food, but with materials for clothing and for tent-making, and thus could migrate at will back from the seas and large rivers.... The meat diet, now for the first time freely available, probably contributed, along with the stimulating climate, to increase the physical vigour and courage of this highest savage, thus urging him along the paths of progress. Nevertheless, many tribes came thus far, and no further, as witness the Athapascans of the Hudson’s Bay Territory and the Indians of the valley of the Columbia.
After the use of fire and the discovery of the bow and arrow came the invention of pottery, the domestication of animals, and the smelting of iron, all successive stages in man’s history which “in their relation to the sum of human progress, transcend in relative importance all his subsequent works,”—and this is even truer if there is included in this period the development of a system of writing, which may be reckoned either the end of the primitive period or the beginning of the period of civilization proper. These two great steps in the story of civilization, language and writing, are closely connected in our minds, though so far separated in time of origin; and their story as told in the Britannica by the world’s greatest authorities, English, American, German, French, Italian, Danish, etc., is an interesting one for the general reader, while the articles are invaluable to the specialist in linguistic study.
Philology
The starting point for a course of reading is the article Philology (Vol. 21, p. 414; equivalent to 80 pages in this Guide), of which the first part, a general treatment, is by the greatest of American philologists, William Dwight Whitney, editor-in-chief of The Century Dictionary, and author of Life and Growth of Language, one of the most important scientific contributions to the subject. The second part, on the comparative philology of the Indo-European languages, is by Prof. Eduard Sievers of Leipzig and Prof. Peter Giles of Cambridge. Both these names are well known to students of the subject, the former as that of the author of numerous valuable works on Germanic phonetics and metric, and the latter as a writer on Greek language and as the author of A Short Manual of Comparative Philology.
The article begins with a definition of “philology,” the science of language, and of “comparative philology,” the comparison of one language with another, in order to bring out their relationships, their structures, and their histories. Prof. Whitney shows how much the recent development of linguistic science owes to the general scientific movement of the age. “No one,” he says, “however ingenious and entertaining his speculations, will cast any real light on the earliest history of speech.” But he notes the obvious analogy between speech and writing, and he puts stress on the “sociality” of man as the prime factor in his development of speech. Other topics in this part of the article are:
Instrumentalities of expression—gesture, grimace, and voice; “language” means “tonguiness”—a mute would call it “handiness”; advantages of voice over gesture.
Imitation as a factor in development of language and of writing; onomatopoetic origin of words.
Development of sign-making: “Among the animals of highest intelligence that associate with man and learn something of his ways, a certain amount of sign-making expressly for communication is not to be denied; the dog that barks at a door because he knows that somebody will come and let him in is an instance of it; perhaps, in wild life, the throwing out of sentinel birds from a flock, whose warning cry shall advertise their fellows of the threat of danger, is as near an approach to it as is anywhere made.”