274 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
as including all possible modes of intelligent communication, the state- 
ment might pass without criticism. But it may be doubted if there is 
any more necessary connection between abstract ideas and sounds, the 
mere signs of thought, that strike the ear, than there is between the same 
ideas and signs addressed only to the eye. 
The point most debated for centuries has been, not whether there was 
any primitive oral language, but what that language was. Some liter- 
alists have indeed argued from the Mosaic narrative that because the 
Creator, by one supernatural act, with the express purpose to form sepa- 
rate peoples, had divided all tongues into their present varieties, and 
could, by another similar exercise of power, obliterate all but one which 
should be universal, the fact that he had not exercised that power showed 
it not to be his will that any man to whom a particular speech had been 
given should hold intercourse with another miraculously set apart from 
him by a different speech. - By this reasoning, if the study of a foreign 
tongue was notimpious, it was at least clear that the primitive language had 
been taken away as a disciplinary punishment, as the Paradisiac Eden 
had been earlier lost, and that, therefore, the search for it was as fruitiess 
as to attempt the passage of the flaming sword. More liberal Christians 
have been disposed to regard the Babel story as allegorical, if not myth- 
ical, and have considered it to represent the disintegration of tongues 
out of one which was primitive. In accordance with the advance of 
linguistic science they have successively shifted back the postulated 
primitive tongue from Hebrew to Sanscrit, then to Aryan, and now seek 
to evoke from the vasty deeps of antiquity the ghosts of other rival 
claimants for precedence in dissolution. As, however, the languages of 
man are now recognized as extremely numerous, and as the very sounds 
of which these several languages are composed are so different that the 
speakers of some are unable to distinguish with the ear certain sounds in 
others, still less able to reproduce them, the search for one common parent 
language is more difficult than was supposed by medieval ignorance. 
The discussion is now, however, varied by the suggested possibility 
that man at some time may have existed without any oral language. 
It is conceded by some writers that mental images or representations 
can be formed without any connection with sound, and may at least 
serve for thought, though not for expression. It is certain that con- 
cepts, however formed, can be expressed by other means than sound. 
One mode of this expressionis by gesture, and there is less reason to believe 
that gestures commenced as the interpretation of, or substitute for words 
than that the latter originated in, and served to translate gestures. Many 
arguments have been advanced to prove that gesture language preceded 
articulate speech and formed the earliest attempt at communication, re- 
sulting from the interacting subjective and objective conditions to which 
primitive man wasexposed. Some of the facts on which deductions have 
been based, made in accordance with well-established modes of scientific 
research from study of the lower animals, children, idiots, the lower types 
of mankind, and deaf-mutes, will be briefly mentioned. 
