312 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
early recorded fragments to have once existed, so subdivided it that 
only the dwellers in a very few villages could talk together with ease. 
They were all interdistributed among unresponsive vernaculars, each to 
the other being bar-bar-ous in every meaning of the term. The number 
of known stocks or families of Indian languages within the territory of 
the United States amounts now to sixty-five, and these differ among 
themselves as radically as each differs from the Hebrew, Chinese, or 
English. In each of these linguistic families there are several, some- 
times as many as twenty, separate languages, which also differ from 
each other as much as do the English, French, German, and Persian 
divisions of the Aryan linguistic stock. 
The use of gesture-signs, continued, if not originating, in necessity 
for communication with the outer world, became entribally convenient 
from the habits of hunters, the main occupation of all savages, depend- 
ing largely upon stealthy approach to game, and from the sole form of 
their military tactics—to surprise an enemy. In the still expanse of 
virgin forests, and especially in the boundless solitudes of the great 
plains, a slight sound ean be heard over a large area, that of the human 
voice being from its rarity the most startling, so that it is now, as it 
probably has been for centuries, a common precaution for members of a 
hunting or war party not to speak together when on such expeditions, 
communicating exclusively by signs. The acquired habit also exhibits 
itself not only in formal oratory and in impassioned or emphatic con- 
versation, but also as a picturesque accompaniment to ordinary social 
talk. Hon. Lewis H. MorGAN mentions in a letter to this writer that he 
found a silent but happy family composed of an Atsina (commonly 
called Gros Ventre of the Prairie) woman, who had been married two 
years to a Frenchman, during which time they had neither of them at- 
tempted to learn each other’s language; but the husband having taken 
kindly to the language of signs, they conversed together by that means 
with great contentment. It is also often resorted to in mere laziness, 
one gesture saving many words. ‘The gracefulness, ingenuity, and ap- 
parent spontaneity of the greater part of the signs can never be realized 
until actually witnessed, and their beauty is much heightened by the 
free play to which the arms of these people are accustomed, and the small 
and well-shaped hands for which they are remarkable. Among them 
can seldom be noticed in literal fact— 
The graceless action of a heavy hand— 
which the Bastard metaphorically condemns in King John. 
The conditions upon which the survival of sign language among the 
Indians has depended is well shown by those attending its discontinu- 
ance among certain tribes. 
Many instances are known of the discontinuance of gesture speech 
with no development in the native language of the gesturers, but from 
the invention for intercommunication of one used in common. The 
