LANGUAGE IX LOWER MAX. 283 



quainted, when I and they made use of signs or pantomime, 

 than in understanding the verbal language of a London 

 servant girl. The talk of the latter has been to me, in fact, 

 sometimes quite unintelligible ; it was impossible for me to 

 understand either what she said, meant, or wanted. 



I have not experienced similar difficulty in New Zealand 

 with the Maoris, in Egypt, Syria, or Morocco with the 

 Arabs, in Iceland with the Icelanders, or in Norway and 

 other parts of the continent of Europe. 



Gesture language alone is made use of by certain monks 

 (Darwin). It is largely employed by some of the most 

 highly civilised peoples possessed of a beautiful and copious 

 spoken, written, and printed language for instance, by the 

 French and the superior eloquence and intelligibility of 

 their non-vocal forms of expression are frequently obvious 

 to the English tourist in France. 



The writer of a recent tract on the life of the factory 

 girls of Lancashire says, C I have seen girls in the Lan- 

 cashire mills perhaps a dozen or twenty yards apart amid 

 the deafening noise of spinning and weaving machinery, tell 

 one another many a long tale on different subjects, the 

 tender passion included, all by motions of the mouth and 

 arms.' 1 The practice of some modern elocutionists such as 

 Mr. Melville Bell, of Edinburgh, in their methods of teaching 

 the dumb to speak, shows that ideas can be conveyed by the 

 mere movements of the lips without the utterance of any 

 kind of sound. The late Sir Benjamin Brodie mentions a 

 deaf girl who could tell her mother's meaning by the mo- 

 tions of her lips and the play of her features. 



Again, what has been called the dumb commerce of Mexico, 

 ancient China and Africa, and the modern East, shows that 

 buying and selling, interrogation and reply, all the details of 

 purchase or sale in the Eastern bazaar, can be, and are, carried 

 on by gesture, symbols, hieroglyphic language, and ivithout 

 words. Many idiots express themselves only by signs (Ire- 

 land) ; and there is much pantomimic language also in the 

 insane adult as well as in the sane child. 



And, lastly, there is a loss of the so-called faculty of 



1 'North British Daily Mail,' November 17, 1874. 



