Note 106 — Chapter XVI
Reading edition
"Diodorus Siculus, Lucretius, Horace, and many other Greek and Roman writers, consider language as one of the arts invented by man. The first men, say they, lived for some time in woods and caves, after the manner of beasts, uttering only confused and indistinct noises, till, associating for mutual assistance, they came by degrees to use articulate sounds mutually agreed upon, for the arbitrary signs or marks of those ideas in the mind of the speaker which he wanted to communicate to the hearer. This opinion sprung from the atomic cosmogony which was framed by Mochus, the Phœnician, and afterward improved by Democritus and Epicurus."—Pouchet's Plurality of the Human Race, p. 142.