MALLERY. ] DEAF-MUTE SIGNS. 307 
among the whites who have had intercourse with them for lengthened 
periods, which convey information readily and accurately. Indeed, be- 
cause of their use of signs, itis the firm belief of many (some uneducated 
and some educated) that the natives of Australia are acquainted with 
the secrets of Freemasonry.” 
In the Report of the cruise of the United States Revenue steamer 
Corwin in the Arctic Ocean, Washington, 1881, it appears that the In- 
nuits of the northwestern extremity of America use signs continually. 
Captain Hooper, commanding that steamer, is reported by Mr. Petroff 
to have found that the natives of Nunivak Island, on the American side, 
below Behring Strait, trade by signs with those of the Asiatic coast, 
whose language is different. Humboldt in his journeyings among the 
Indians of the Orinoco, where many small isolated tribes spoke languages 
not understood by any other, found the language of signs in full opera- 
tion. Spix and Martius give a similar account of the Puris and Coroados 
of Brazil. 
It is not necessary to enlarge under the present heading upon the 
signs of deaf-mutes, except to show the intimate relation between sign 
language as practiced by them and the gesture signs, which, even if not 
“natural,” are intelligible to the most widely separated of mankind. A 
Sandwich Islander, a Chinese, and the Africans from the slaver Ami- 
stad have, in published instances, visited our deaf-mute institutions 
with the same result of free and pleasurable intercourse; and an Eng- 
lish deaf-mute had no difficulty in conversing with Laplanders. It ap- 
pears, also, on the authority of Sibscota, whose treatise was published 
in 1670, that Cornelius Haga, ambassador of the United Provinces to 
the Sublime Porte, found the Sultan’s mutes to have established a lan- 
guage among themselves in which they could discourse with a speaking 
interpreter, a degree of ingenuity interfering with the object of their se- 
lection as slaves unable to repeat conversation. A curious instance has 
also been reported to the writer of operatives in a large mill where the 
constant rattling of the machinery rendered them practically deaf during 
the hours of work and where an original system of gestures was adopted. 
In connection with the late international convention, at Milan, of per- 
sons interested in the instruction of deaf-mutes which, in the enthusiasm 
of the members for the new system of artificial articulate speech, made 
war upon all gesture-signs, it is curious that such prohibition of gesture 
should be urged regarding mutes when it was prevalent to so great an 
extent among the speaking people of the country where the convention 
was held, and when the advocates of it were themselves so dependent 
on gestures to assist their own oratory if not their ordinary conversa- 
tion. Artificial articulation surely needs the aid of significant gestures 
more, when in the highest perfection to which it can attain, than does oral 
speech in its own high development. The use of artificial speech is also 
necessarily confined to the oral language acquired by the interlocutors 
‘and throws away the advantage of universality possessed by signs. 
