Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/258

244 CRITICAL NOTICES: the change from aspirata to media and tenuis, and the opposite and simultaneous change from tenuis to aspirata? For such is the substance of Grimm's law (as Wundt himself, indeed, has noted p. 410). Moreover, it is not at all certain that Wundt's assumption is correct. Do savages talk less rapidly than civilised men ? Wundt, of course, is ready to admit the lack of any satis- factory evidence. But merely to ask the question is to realise its ambiguity. Is it the emotionally excited or the comparatively calm savage we are speaking of? The rate of speech certainly varies with the speaker's emotional states. On the other hand, the rate with which ideas follow one another does not seem neces- sarily to vary in direct proportion to the degree of culture. Wundt believes that it does (p. 420). Yet he makes no attempt to justify his belief by making an exhaustive analysis of the factors upon which the rate of speech depends. Practice is the only definite one mentioned by him. But it is clear that there are many others the development of abstract ideas, the increasing complexity of meaning, the possible changes in emotional excitability, etc., etc. which may not all tend to produce the same results. Wundt explains in the same way the mutual influence upon one another of two sounds in more or less close contact. (Regressive and progressive sound-induction.) A section upon Assimilation the influence through association of one word upon another, closes the chapter. Chapter v. deals with the formation of words, naturally from the psycho-physical point of view. The physiological mechanism is discussed, so too the pathological disturbances of the function of speech, aphasia, paraphasia and amnesia ; there is a section on the shortcomings of the cerebral localisation theory ; and the chapter includes a small treatise on the psycho-physiology of reading, on the apprehension of the spoken and written sentence. Erdmann and Dodge are hardly treated with the respect to which their careful labours are entitled, and there is nothing noteworthy in the treatment of the psychology of meaning, but the account is a useful resume of the experimental work hitherto published. All this, however, belongs to the province not so much of social as of general psychology ; and so it is, indeed, with the rest of this. chapter, and practically the whole of the book. But for an occa- sional reference to imitation or tradition, we are told wonderfully little of the social factor. As a consequence of his psychological analysis of the nature of the word, Wundt finally rejects the 1 realistic ' theory of roots, and allows them only a conceptual validity. They are what remains when philological analysis. has separated the word into its ground and its connective elements. " In the beginning was the word " : " Die Annahme einer Wurzelperiode der Sprache it ein Phantasiegebilde " (p. 559). Neologisms are next examined, and some interesting points are made with regard to such groups of words as e.g. baumeln, bammeln, bimmeln, bummeln, of which each seems to be derived from the previous one by a process of partial onomatopoeia (p.