Part 7

The words buzz, crackle, crash, blow, rattle, roar, hiss, whistle, and many others of a like nature and construction, were evidently formed to imitate the sounds themselves. Sometimes the word expressing an object is formed to imitate the sound produced by that object, as waye, cuckoo, whippoorwill, whisper, hum. I have been thus particular in calling the attention of the reader to these beautiful characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon because it is the language of the Cat in so far as word-signs are used in it for want of action to express the ideas or as conjunctives more particularly. The smooth and liquid passages from your poets, which express onomatopoeia, are but echoes from that most beautiful of all languages, that of the Cat. Such are the word-signs of Goldsmith,

"The whitewashed wall, the nicely sanded floor, The varnished clock that clicked behind the door."

To the credit of the Cat language it must be said that, while it is esteemed a great beauty in writing and conversation, as well as speaking, when the word-signs selected for the expression of an idea convey, by their sound, some resemblance to the subject which they express, the Cat language contains none but such words. You will remember the most wonderful poem written in the English language, and notice the word-painting in the following extract from "Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard,"

"For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind!"

Pope, also, in his "Essay on Criticism," in a manner though different yet scarcely less expressive, gives a verbal representation of his idea, by the selection of his terms in the following:

"These equal syllables alone require, Though oft the ear the open vowels tire, While expletives their feeble aid do join, And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."

And, once again, Pope says,

"A needless Alexandrian ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags his slow length along. Soft is the strain when zephyrs gently blow, And the smooth streams in smoother numbers flow, But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse, rough verse should, like the torrent, roar. When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line, too, labors, and the words move slow. Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main."

I am of the opinion that language is of Divine origin, and that it was put into the mouth of the Cat, the same as it was put into the mouth of Adam, by the Almighty. In this opinion I am encouraged by many of your most prominent writers. In fact, it is the only sensible theory upon which we can stand. But the very first expression of a desire was a sign by action of the muscles, frequently followed by a sound-sign. This has often been demonstrated when infants have been placed, for a year or more, in a room where no speech or expressive action has met either eye or ear, and it has not yet been doubted. Many men have written upon the subject of the origin of language, from every point of view, the majority of these endeavoring to account for its existence without allowing that it is of Divine origin. Undoubtedly the first man, Adam, could talk as naturally as he could hear, see and taste. Speech was a part of his endowment. Is there anything more wonderful in man's talking than in a bird singing, save that speech is a higher order of utterance? Dumb nature, so called, performs marvels every day as wonderful as man talking. The honey bee builds its cell, ignorant of the fact that such a construction is a solution of a problem which had troubled men for centuries to solve--namely, at what point should certain lines meet so as to give the most room with the least material and have the greatest strength in building? This problem is said to have been worked out by a Mr. McLaughlin, a noted Scotch mathematician, who arrived at his conclusion by a laborious and careful fluctionary calculation. To his surprise and the surprise of the whole world, such lines and such a building were found in the common bee cell. Is there anything preposterous in my assertion that the same Creator who gave to the bee the mathematical instinct, could endow animals with the instinct of speech? In proportion as the English language has clung to the purest of Anglo-Saxon words it has gained strength throughout the world, while there have gone down before it the real British, the Cymeric or Welsh, Erse or Irish, the Gaelic of Scotland, and the Manx of the Isle of Man. The British Keltic is entirely gone, and the rest are only local. Besides these, it ousted from the island of Norse the Norman French and several other tongues which had sought to plant themselves on English soil.

My illustrious comrade, Prevost Paradol, one of our most learned Frenchmen, says: "Neither Russia nor united Germany, supposing that they should attain the highest fortune, can pretend to impede that current of things, nor prevent that solution, relatively near at hand, of the long rivalry of European races for the ultimate colonization and domination of the universe. The world will not be Russian, nor German, nor French, alas! nor Spanish. It will be Anglo-Saxon."

It was one of Britain's greatest poets who wrote the following characteristic lines expressive of the force of languages:

"Greek's a harp we love to hear, Latin is a trumpet clear; Spanish, like an organ, swells, Italian rings its bridal bells; France, with many a frolic mien, Tunes her sprightly violin; Loud the German rolls his drum, When Russia's clashing cymbals come But Britain's sons may well rejoice, For English is the human voice."

It is a noticeable fact that there have been five hundred distinct languages, and about three thousand five hundred colloquials, or about five thousand different forms of speech since Adam's time. At the present time five hundred of the primary are dead, so that there are about nine hundred now spoken on all the earth, with about two thousand five hundred colloquials.

Canon Farrar says: "We may, therefore, assert, as Dante did, more than five centuries ago,

"That man speaks, is nature's prompting; Whether thus or thus she leaves to you As you do most affect it."

I am surprised at some of the heedlessness of your philologists, and do not wonder that your children have a hard time of it acquiring your language when they are so carelessly misdirected in many instances, misled in many more and given rules which even the fully developed mind of a man is unable to comprehend. It is not from one alone of your linguists that I take this definition of the word "language." "Language is the expression of our ideas by articulate sounds, such as the signs of the ideas." Your Noah Webster, who gathered together all dictionaries extant, including all scientific words and definitions, and dumped them into his big book, gives the definition of the word "language" as follows: "The expression of ideas by words or significant articulate sounds for the communication of thought."

Now, if these definitions are correct, and you choose to accept them as being so, what becomes of the "language" of the deaf and dumb?

XIV.

POWER OF SPEECH IN THE FELINE.

It is not true that all animals have vocal chords. Some are marsupial, such as the kangaroo, and have membranous vocal chords, which stretch upon themselves and so cannot be stretched by the arytenoid muscles. A few of them are mammalia, such as the giraffe, the porcupine, and the armadillo, have no vocal chords, and are, therefore, mute. This is also the case with the cetacea, the loud bellowing of the whale being produced by the expulsion of water through the nostrils during the act of expiration. Serpents have no vocal chords, and their hiss is the result of breathing forcibly down through a soft glottis. Frogs have no trachea, so that their larynx opens into the bronchial tube, but the loudness of the croaking of male frogs is due to the distension of two membranous sacs at the side of the neck. Some frogs have membranous vocal chords, others two reed-like bodies, the anterior ends of which are fixed, while the posterior ends with the ventricles of the larynx and the laryngo-pharyngeal sacs looking into the bronchi are free.

The vocal organs of both man and the other animals present a general resemblance to each other, despite varying degrees of development. Cats have a sac between the thyroid cartilage and the os hyoideum, which have much to do with the modifying and increasing of the tones of the voice. The laryngeal sacs are small, and thus prevent what might be a shrill cry, such as the deafening shrieks of the monkeys of Africa. The epiglottis is comparatively small, and there are proportionately small cavities in the thyroid cartilage and the os hyoideum, which communicate with the ventricles of the larynx and the laryngeal-pharyngeal sacs, which give the peculiar softness of musical tone to the feline, as may be noted by a merely casual observer, and is accounted one of the most delightful characteristics of the Cat.

The brain of the Cat so closely resembles that of man as to force the unwilling admission from anatomists and physiologists that in form and substance they bear so close and striking a similarity that it must be conceded that they are, to all intents and purposes, the same in substance and conformation, and differ only in weight and size. It will be seen, from this admission of the greatest of physiologists and anatomists, possessed as men are of the natural prejudice against all animals, saving only man, in the way of his ascendency in every respect above all other animals, that, in the proportion of weight of brain and under similar circumstances, the intelligence of the Cat is equal to that of man. These forced admissions must necessarily carry conviction with them, so that I shall hope, at no distant day, to hear the admission of what to me is a proven fact, that in the ratio of the size of the two brains the Cat is equal in intelligence to man under the same existing circumstances.

The negro of America, brought up in ignorance and under servile conditions, a slave, classified as cattle, was once considered an inferior order of the human species by some, and by many as a biped, but a long step beneath his now regarded white brother. Time and experience developed the fact that the negro was susceptible of cultivation, and his ebony brain, contained in a skull of twice and thrice the thickness of the white man's, has been polished to a high degree, in exceptional cases, although I must admit that this polishing has been found to be in proportion to the degree of amalgamation with other races, particularly that of the white man.

Anatomists are unanimous in their opinions and their experiments show conclusively that the Cat has a much finer and more delicate organism than the dog. Upon this universal deduction I argue that they are more sensitive than the dog, a proposition which meets the approval of every naturalist, anatomist and pathologist who has ever taken the subject into consideration. In fact, it is almost universally conceded that Cats are fully as intelligent as dogs, and by many the feline is regarded as the superior animal in every respect.

Prof. William Lindsay, M.D., F.R.S., F.L.S., Hon. Member New Zealand Institute, says in his remarkable work, entitled "Mind in the Lower Animals": "The lower animals are subject to the same kinds of bodily diseases as affect men. They are subject to the same kinds of mental disorders, productible by the same causes as in man." He asserts that Cats readily comprehend and thoroughly understand man's words and the conversation of men. The following attributes he ascribes to the Cat, namely, "a moral sense in so far as it involves, a, honesty; b, sense of duty or trust; c, sense of guilt and shame; d, concealment of crime.

"They are self-sacrificing, even to death, understanding man's language, verbal and other, including the reading of human character and words, the interpretation of facial expressions, use of money and knowledge of its power and the principle of barter, buying and selling, self-control, appetite, co-operation with man, both in useful service and in crime, sensitiveness to insult or affront, neglect, injustice, punishment and reproof, discovery of murderers and murders, lost or stolen property, idea of time, tune, number, order, succession of events. On the whole the place next to man, as respects both intellect and morals, is usually assigned to the dog, a rank which is, undoubtedly, due to his intimate association with and careful training by man for countless generations, for there can be no question as to the hereditary transmission and consequent accumulation of the truths, good or bad, of education by or in imitation of man.

"Man ascribes to the Cat spitefulness, selfishness, cold cruelty, stealthiness, treachery and attachment to place and not to person. The poor Cat has, probably, been as much maligned and misunderstood as it has been petted. We are told that its apparent affection is only 'a cupboard love,' and that this is popularly supposed to be sufficient to account for its propensity to pilfer eatables and drinkables. It is said to be attached to place, not to person, to stick to a given house, even when a master or a mistress who has heaped kindness upon it has had occasion to change quarters. Absurd stories are told as to its sucking children's breath. To speak of a scandal-propagating, sour old maid as 'spiteful as a Cat' is so common, and we hear the Cat so frequently accused of stealthiness or treachery--of the enjoyment of the tortures of its victims and of calculating cruelty, and yet Wood tells us, 'instead of being a greedy, selfish animal, it is really a very unselfish and generous one, capable of great sacrifices.' Jesse mentions one that fed a jay twice a day with mice. Another Cat always brought and laid at her master's feet the mice she had caught, before she would eat them; she made use of them as food only when they were given back to her by her master. The attachment of the Cat is frequently as great to person as to place, such attachment, however, depending usually on how far she is understood, sympathized with and kindly treated.

"Cases have been given of Cats following their masters from house to house and place to place, accompanying them on visits to other people's residences as unconcerned as a dog. They may be trained to guard and defend like a dog."