TONE AND GESTURE. TO" 



manner so singularly complete that to an onlooker the result 

 seems almost magical. 



Thus "the Indians who have been shown over the 

 civilized East have often succeeded in holding intercourse by 

 means of their invention and application of principles, in what 

 may be called the voiceless mother utterance, with white deaf- 

 mutes, who surely have no semiotic code more nearly 

 connected with that attributed to the Indians than is derived 

 from their common humanity. They showed the greatest 

 pleasure in meeting deaf-mutes, precisely as travellers in a 

 foreign country are rejoiced to meet persons speaking their 

 language." * 



Again, Tylor says, " Gesture-language is substantially the 

 same all the world over," and Mallery confirms this by the 

 remark that " the writer's study not only sustains it, but shows 

 a surprising number of signs for the same idea which are 

 substantially identical, not only among savage tribes, but 

 among all peoples that use gesture-signs with any freedom. 

 Men, in groping for a mode of communication with each other, 

 and using the same general methods, have been under many 

 varying conditions and circumstances which have determined 

 differently many conceptions and their semiotic execution, but 

 there have also been many of both which were similar." 



Such being the case, it is a matter of interest to determine 

 the syntax of this language ; for we may be sure that by so 

 doing we are at work upon the root-principles of the sign- 

 making faculty where it arises out of the logic of recepts, 

 and not upon the developed ramifications of this faculty 

 where we find it wrought up into the more highly conven- 

 tional logic of concepts characteristic of speech. But before I 

 enter upon this branch of our subject, I shall say a few words 

 to show to what a high degree of perfection gesture-language 

 admits of being developed. 



* Mallery, loc. cit., p. 320. The author gives several very interesting records 

 of such conversations, and adds that the mutes show more aptitude in understand 

 ing the Indians than vice versa, because to them " the 'action, action, action,' of 

 Di'mosthenes is their only oratory, and not a heightening of it, however vahinhle." 



