284 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
of speech when the articulate or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primi- 
tive men were made the significant representations of thought by the 
gestures with which they were accompanied. This statement is specially 
gratifying to the present writer as he had advanced much the same 
views in his first publication on the subject in the following paragraph, 
now reproduced with greater confidence : 
“From their own failures and discordancies, linguistic scholars have 
recently decided that both the ‘bow-wow’ and the ‘ ding-dong’ theories 
are unsatisfactory; that the search for imitative, onomatopeeic, and di- 
rectly expressive sounds to explain the origin of human speech has been 
too exclusive, and that many primordial roots of language have been 
founded in the involuntary sounds accompanying certain actions. As, 
however, the action was the essential, and the consequent or concomi- 
tant sound the accident, it would be expected that a representation or 
feigned reproduction of the action would have been used to express the 
the idea before the sound associated with that action could have been 
separated from it. The visual onomatopeia of gestures, which even 
yet have been subjected to but slight artificial corruption, would there- 
fore serve as a key to the audible. It is also contended that in the 
pristine days, when the sounds of the only words yet formed had close 
connection with objects and the ideas directly derived from them, signs 
were as much more copious for communication than speech, as the sight 
embraces more and more distinct characteristics of objects than does the 
sense of hearing.” 
CONCLUSIONS. 
The preponderance of authority is in favor of the view that man, when 
in the possession of all his faculties, did not choose between voice and 
gesture, both being originally instinctive, as they both are now, and 
never, with those faculties, was in a state where the one was used to the 
absolute exclusion of the other. The long neglected work of Dalgarno, 
published in 1661, is now admitted to show wisdom when he says: “non 
minus naturale fit homini communicare in Figuris quam Sonis: quorum 
utrumque dico homini naturale.” With the voice man at first imitated 
the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he exhibited actions, mo- 
tions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, and distances, and their 
derivatives. It would appear from this unequal division of capacity 
that oral speech remained rudimentary long after gesture had become 
an art. With the concession of all purely imitative sounds and of the 
spontaneous action of the vocal organs under excitement, it is still true 
that the connection between ideas and words generally depended upon 
a compact between the speaker and hearer which presupposes the ex- 
istence of a prior mode of communication. That was probably by ges- 
ture, which, in the apposite phrase of Professor SAYCcE, “like the rope- 
bridges of the Himalayas or the Andes, formed the first rade means of 
communication between man and man.” At the very least it may be 
