Jaxcary 1, 1887.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



57 



mau sought to express his thought was, if I may so call it, 



pictoiial. The untaught deaf and dumb, whose ideas are 

 mainly of aspects and actions, as I have shown, express these 

 ideas by gestures which are essentially representations, the 

 young child adds to its expressive gestures sounds which are 

 imitative, and which, being understood by the child's relations, 

 become words, sui-viving until supplanted by words in ordi- 

 nary usage. The language of the savage is to a gi'eat extent 

 made up of gestures, and hence everything would lead us to 

 believe that the primitive man, whose feelings, like our own, 

 were instinctively expressed, would endeavour to represent 

 his ideas, necessarily very crude, by illusti'ating them, ;xs it 

 were, representing aspects and actions of things by gestures, 

 and sounds by sounds. 



^ly friend Professor Sayce h;is observed " There was a 

 time in the historj' of speech when the articulate or semi- 

 articidate sounds uttered by primitive man were made the 

 significant representatives of thought by the gestures with 

 which they were accomp;uiied, and this complex of sound 

 and gesture — a complex in which the sound had no meaning 

 apart from the gesture^was the earliest sentence."* 



The Eev. J. L. Wilson, describing the Grebo language, 

 says it has pereonal pronouns, but they ar-e rarely used, and 

 whether the verb is in the first or second person and so on 

 is shown by gesture. 



Fisher states that the Comauclies and neighbouring tribes 

 have " a language of signs by which all Indians and traders 

 can undei-stand one another; and they always make these 

 signs when communicating among themselves." f James 

 writes of the Kiawa-Kashaia Indians : " The nations, 

 though constantly associating together and united under 

 the influence of the Bear- Tooth, are yet totally ignorant of 

 each other's language, insomuch that it was no uncommon 

 occun-ence to see two individuals of difl'erent nations sitting 

 upon the giound and conversing freely by means of the 

 language of signs. In the art of convening theii- ideas they 

 were thorough adepts, and their manual display was only 

 interrupted at remote intervals by a smUe or by the 

 auxiliary of an articulated word of the language of the 

 Crow Indians, which to a verj^ limited extent passes current 

 among them."± 



Xow the manual sign language, used alike by the unedu- 

 cated deaf mute and by the savage, is a pictorial language 

 imitative of the iispeots and n , tions of objects, and it is 

 therefore easy to believe that in those who could hear and 

 reproduce sounds vocal imitation would rank higli as a 

 means of communicating ideas. The human ear and vocal 

 organs, and the mind which uses them, are and always 

 have been much the same all the world over ; and that the 

 first words, wherever developed, were imitative words there 

 is little room for doubt. This interesting subject I shall 

 more fully discuss and illustrate in my next article. 



A WHIST SUPERSTITION. 



Br "Five of Clubs." 



CORRESPONDENT (G. B.) sends us the 

 following amusing account of an episode at 

 the whist-table, and of the appearance, alive 

 and to some degi-ee kicking, of a very old 

 whist superstition, which we had supposed 

 to be dead : — 



" The other night, while playing whist 

 with two \ery old packs of cards, misdeals were in conse- 

 quence frequent. One of our adversaries, after a misdeal, 



* Introd. Sc. of Lang., vol. i., p. 116. 



t Trans. Eth. Soc. (1869), i., p. 283. 



t " Expedition to the Rocky ilouutains," iii , p. 52. 



offered a bet that some one in the next hand would hold a 

 single card of some suit. My partner took the bet, but, 

 most curiously, no less than four single cards appeared. 

 Later on he offered two to one, after another misdeal, and 

 won again. I had not he;ird of the superstition before, and, 

 knowing that the appearance of single cards after dealing 

 ^vith one pack cotild not be affected by a misdeal with 

 another pack, supposed it would arise from the fact that the 

 odds in any deal whatever would be in favour of some player 

 holding a single card. This idea was scouted ; so I went 

 into the question afterwards for my own satisfaction. I 

 should be glad to know if my calcidations are cori-ect." 



Oiu- correspondent proceeds to ailculate the chances in the 

 following way : — He supposes a player to have a spade dealt 

 him first, and calculates the chance that as the rest of that 

 player's hand is dealt another spade will not be given him, 

 finding it quite correctly. He then multiplier that chance 

 by i for the several suits, which also is correct in principle. 

 And then he multiplies the resulting chance yet again by I 

 for the different hands, which is not correct ; coiTesponding 

 to the mistake of multiplying A, the chance of throwing 

 "ace" with a die at one cast, by 6, to get the chance of 

 throwing " ace " in six casts, getting 1 or certainty, which 

 is certainly wrong. 



But the fact is, our correspondent's resitlt, 7 to 4 against 

 a singleton appearing somewhere among the deals, is far from 

 the truth. His method of calculation errs in this, that it 

 deals only with the chance of there being a singleton in the 

 suit from which the tust card de;tlt to a hand may chance to 

 come ; whereas a singleton may show, and is, of course, 

 more likely to show, in a suit which is not the first dealt to 

 a hand. 



The superstition in question is a very old one. It appears 

 in Bohn's " Handbook of Games " in the following monstrous 

 form : — 



" The degree in wliich whist is arbitrarily affected by the 

 cards may be gathered from the following fact (!) : — After a 

 misdeal, on dealing again with the same pack, one of the 

 players will, ni/ie times out oj' ten [the italics are very much 

 ours], hold at most but one card of one of the four 

 suits. How this comes to pass is a problem that remains 

 to be solved : whether the fact be so or not is of very simple 

 proof." 



This, of course, outrages sense. Apai-t from the inherent 

 absurdity of the superstition, we have the absurd statement 

 that the fact can be readily tested. Xow misdeals do not 

 occur so often, nor have the results of deals after a misdeal 

 been so commonly or so carefully noted that the supposed 

 law can be readily or simply proved from any evidence 

 collected in the past. Imagine a whist party or club under- 

 taking to test the matter, wilful misdeals would of coiu'se 

 not count, and what a set of dufi'ers a whist party or club 

 must be which could in any retisonable time provide the 

 hundreds, nay the thousands, of real misdeals which would 

 be necessary to submit the supposed law to adequate 

 experimental test ! 



But the real chance of a singleton appearing in one or 

 other of the bands, or in more than one, at any deal, is so 

 much larger than most persons suppose that the birth and 

 gi'owth of a superstition of the kind can be readily under- 

 stood, so many having no idea whatever in these as yet un- 

 scientific days of considering causation. Doubtless our 

 correspondent's correct reasoning on this point was scouted 

 by the holders of the fancy he rejected. Yet probably they 

 were not weakminded fancies, which, for persons who con- 

 sidered causation would be to all intents and purposes 

 idiotic, are merely the results of a kind of lazy thought- 

 lessness in those to whom the idea of causation is un- 

 familiar. 



