138 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



siderable amount of knowledge by means of signs, and 

 of expressing themselves by them.' " 



The following interesting remarks are quoted * from 

 Colonel Mallery : " The wishes and emotions of very 

 young children are conveyed in a small number of 

 sounds, but in a great variety of gestures and facial 

 expressions. A child's gestures are intelligent long in 

 advance of speech ; although very early and persistent 

 attempts are made to give it instruction in the latter, but 

 none in the former, from the time when it begins risu 

 cognoscere matrein. It learns words only as they are 

 taught, and learns them through the medium of signs 

 which are not expressly taught. Long after familiarity 

 with speech, it consults the gestures and facial expressions 

 of its parents and nurses, as if seeking thus to translate 

 or explain their words. . . . The insane understand and 

 obey gestures when they have no knowledge whatever 

 of words. . . . Sufferers from aphasia continue to use 

 appropriate gestures." 



Colonel Mallery also says that " Indians who have 

 been shown over the civilized East [of the United 

 States] 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 meet- 



* p. 105. From his "Sign-language among the North American 

 Indians" (First Annual Report of tlie Bureau of Ethnology): 

 Washington, 1881. 



