in its most extensive sense, is the instrument or means of communicating ideas and affections of the mind and body, from one animal to another.  In this sense, brutes possess the power of language; for by various inarticulate sounds, they make known their wants, desires, and sufferings.”—­ Philosophical Gram., p. 11; Improved Gram., p. 5.  This latter definition the author of that vain book, “the District School,” has adopted in his chapter on Grammar.  Sheridan, the celebrated actor and orthoepist, though he seems to confine language to the human species, gives it such an extension as to make words no necessary part of its essence.  “The first thought,” says he, “that would occur to every one, who had not properly considered the point, is, that language is composed of words.  And yet, this is so far from being an adequate idea of language, that the point in which most men think its very essence to consist, is not even a necessary property of language.  For language, in its full extent, means, any way or method whatsoever, by which all that passes in the mind of one man, may be manifested to another.”—­Sheridan’s Lectures on Elocution, p. 129.  Again:  “I have already shown, that words are, in their own nature, no essential part of language, and are only considered so through custom.”—­Ib. p. 135.

OBS. 3.—­According to S. Kirkham’s notion, “LANGUAGE, in its most extensive sense, implies those signs by which men and brutes, communicate to each other their thoughts, affections and desires.”—­Kirkham’s English Gram., p. 16.  Again:  “The language of brutes consists in the use of those inarticulate sounds by which they express their thoughts and affections.”—­Ib. To me it seems a shameful abuse of speech, and a vile descent from the dignity of grammar, to make the voices of “brutes” any part of language, as taken in a literal sense.  We might with far more propriety raise our conceptions of it to the spheres above, and construe literally the metaphors of David, who ascribes to the starry heavens, both “speech” and “language,” “voice” and “words,” daily “uttered” and everywhere “heard.”  See Psalm xix.

OBS. 4.—­But, strange as it may seem, Kirkham, commencing his instructions with the foregoing definition of language, proceeds to divide it, agreeably to this notion, into two sorts, natural and artificial; and affirms that the former “is common both to man and brute,” and that the language which is peculiar to man, the language which consists of words, is altogether an artificial invention:[83] thereby contradicting at once a host of the most celebrated grammarians and philosophers, and that without appearing to know it.  But this is the less strange, since he immediately forgets his own definition and division of the subject, and as plainly contradicts himself.