MALLERY.] ORIGIN OF SIGN LANGUAGE. 273 
denote the passing of the sentence of death on the offenders, and the 
ordering them away to execution. 
* * * * * * * 
“ He quickly turned round to his slate and wrote a correct and com- 
plete account of this story of Brutus and his two sons.” 
While it appears that the expressions of the features are not confined 
to the emotions or to distinguishing synonyms, it must be remembered that 
the meaning of the same motion of hands, arms, and fingers is often 
modified, individualized, or accentuated by associated facial changes 
and postures of the body not essential to the sign, which emotional 
changes and postures are at once the most difficult to describe and the 
most interesting when intelligently reported, not only because they in- 
fuse life into the skeleton sign, but because they may belong to the class 
of innate expressions. 
THE ORIGIN OF SIGN LANGUAGE. 
In observing the maxim that nothing can be thoroughly understood un- 
lessits beginning is known, it becomes necessary to examine into the origin 
of sign language through its connection with that of oral speech. In 
this examination it is essential to be free from the vague popular im- 
prression that some oral language, of the general character of that now 
used among mankind, is “natural” to mankind. It will be admitted on 
reflection that all oral languages were at some past time far less service- 
able to those using them than they are now, and as each particular lan- 
guage has been thoroughly studied it has become evident that it grew 
out of some other and less advanced form. In the investigation of these 
old forms it has been so difficult to ascertain how any of them first be- 
came a useful instrument of inter-communication that many conflicting 
theories on this subject have been advocated. 
Oral language consists of variations and mutations of vocal sounds 
produced as signs of thought and emotion. But it is not enough that 
those signs should be available as the vehicle of the producer’s own 
thoughts. They must be also efficient for the communication of such 
thoughts to others. It has been, until of late years, generally held that 
thought was not possible without oral language, and that, as man was 
supposed to have possessed from the first the power of thought, he also 
from the first possessed and used oral language substantially as at 
present. That the latter, as a special faculty, formed the main distine- 
tion between man and the brutes has been and still is the prevailing 
doctrine. Ina lecture delivered before the British Association in 1878 it 
was declared that ‘animalintelligence is unable to elaborate that class of 
abstract ideas, the formation of which depends upon the faculty of 
speech.” If instead of “speech” the word “utterance” had been used, 
