Mattery.] GESTURES OF PUBLIC SPEAKERS—INDIAN CONDITIONS. 311 
it was customary for the erier to give some short preliminary explana- 
tion of what was to be acted, which advantage is now retained by our 
play-bills, always more specific when the performance is in a foreign 
language, unless, indeed, the management is interested in the sale of 
librettos. 
GESTURES OF OUR PUBLIC SPEAKERS. 
If the scenic gestures are so seldom significant, those appropriate to 
oratory are of course still lessso. They require energy, variety, and pre- 
cision, butalso a degree of simplicity which is incompatible with the needs 
of sign language. Asregards imitation, they arerestrained within narrow 
bounds and are equally suited to a great variety of sentiments. Among the 
admirable illustrations in Austin’s Chironomia of gestures applicable to 
the several passages in Gay’s ‘‘ Miser and Plutus” one is given for “But 
virtue’s sold” which is perfectly appropriate, but is not in the slightest 
degree suggestive either of virtue or of the transaction of sale. It could 
be used for an indefinite number of thoughts or objects which properly 
excited abhorrence, and therefore without the words gives no special in- 
terpretation. Oratorical delivery demands general grace—cannot rely 
upon the emotions of the moment for spontaneous appropriateness, and 
therefore requires preliminary study and practice, such as are applied to 
dancing and fencing with a similar object; indeed, accomplishment in 
both dancing and fencing has been recommended as of use to all orators. 
In reference to this subject a quotation from Lord Chesterfield’s letters 
is in place: “I knew a young man, who, being just elected a member of 
Parliament, was laughed at for being discovered, through the key-hole 
of his chamber door, speaking to himself in the glass and forming his 
looks and gestures. I could not join in that laugh, but, on the contrary, 
thought him much wiser than those that laughed at him, for he knew 
the importance of those little graces in a public assembly and they did 
not.” 
OUR INDIAN CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO SIGN LAN- 
GUAGE. 
In no other thoroughly explored part of the world has there been 
found spread over so large a space so small a number of individuals 
divided by so many linguistic and dialectic boundaries as in North 
America. Many wholly distinct tongues have foran indefinitely long time 
been confined to a few scores of speakers, verbally incomprehensible to 
all others on the face of the earth who did not, from some rarely opera- 
ting motive, laboriously acquire their language. Even when the Ametri- 
can race, so styled, flourished in the greatest population of which we 
have any evidence (at least according to the published views of the 
present writer, which seem to have been generally accepted), the im- 
mense number of languages and dialects still preserved, or known by 
