For something more than ten years the ethnological bureau of the Smith-soniou Institution has been engaged in collecting materials for a projected series of publications on Indian languages and anthropology, It is known that among the aboriginal tribes at least five hundred languages are spoken, and it is believed that the stocks or families demanding separate description number about seventy. It is thus evident that a wide and rich field offers itself for investigation, and equally evident that without the combined Jabour of many workers little can be done towards accomplishing the task of collecting and ce-ordinating the wealth of facts offered. Yet again, in order to render the work as fruitful as possible, a definite and uniform plan has to be adopted, otherwise energy may be wasted in directions already fully explored, or lost through imperfect application. An introduction to the study of Indinn languages has already been issued with a view to securing order and precision in the investigations undertaken, and we have now before us a pamphlet containing inquiries and suggestions upon gesture language among the Indians, which, besides its special value in view of the particular end proposed, is of the highest general interest. For nothing less is involved in the systematic examination of gesture language than an enguiry into the origin of speech. It is admitted by most linguistic scholars that many of the roots of primitive language were simply the involuntary sounds accompanying certain actions. But as any given action must itself always have been the essential, and the accompanying sound merely an accident, it is reasonable to believe that the iden of the action would be long represented in pantomime, before the associated sound would be separate?) from it. Thus gesture speech would' have become an art within a period during which oral speech would have remained rudimentary, confined prob. ably to the imitation of natural sounds, and to the accentuation of emotional gestures. Where speech has reached a high degree of development the relation is exactly reversed, but we hardly need to be. reminded how large a part gesture still plays in dramatic and rhetorical exhibitions, Nor is it to be forgotten that in deaf-mute institu. tions where so much invaluable work is modestly hidden away, a universal sign language has of late years dis. placed the usefal but clumsy deaf-and-damp alphabet. How unconventional this language is, is proved by the fact that a professor in a deaf-mute college who lately visited several of the wild tribes on the plains made himself under. stood among all of them without knowing a word of any of their languages, Such an experience as this makes one dream of a time when all mankind may be able to interchange their ideas without the preliminary labour of learning one another's tongues. More immediate, however, is the assistance which a study of gesture language gives towards the explanation of picture writing, which is only the permanent reproduction on bark or stone of picture speaking, wherein evanescent images are delineated on the-dissolving air, The collocation of figures taking the places of sentences exhibits the natural order of ideas in the aboriginal mind, and it would appear from a study of both Indian hieroglyphs and of deaf-mute pantomime that in all sign utterance the principal idea stands first, while the accessories are success. sively added in the order of import. ance.
The whole theory and practice of gesture language lies in this—that all who understand its principles can make themselves mutually intelligible.. We gave an instance above, Deaf-mutes educated on different systems; Indians of widely separated tribes; Indians and deaf-mutes; Chinese, Esquimaux, Indians and deaf-mates have on different occasions been variously grouped, with the result of becoming mutually intelligible after some brief preliminary compromise between divergent gestures. There is therefore a general system of sign language, but not a uniform code, Among the Indian tribes specially studied, the signs used to denote animals are for the most part universal, being derived from pantomimic representations either of the common form or motion or mode of using the various wild and domestic) beasts. So the idea of property is indicated by a grasping motion of the hand, and that of content by a waving outward of the hand from the breast, as if to signify that the heart is at lease. Carinnsly, too, wonder is expressed by the hand placed before the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.