814 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
confusion and difficulty. After the facts are established the theories 
will take care of themselves, and their final enunciation will be in the 
hands of men more competent than the writer will ever pretend to be, 
although his knowledge, after careful study of all data attainable, may 
be considerably increased. The mere collection of facts, however, can- 
not be prosecuted to advantage without predetermined rules of judgment, 
nor can they be classified at all without the adoption of some principle 
which involves a tentative theory. More than a generation ago Baader 
noticed that scientific observers only accumulated great masses of sepa- 
rate facts without establishing more connection between them than an 
arbitrary and imperfect classification; and before him Goethe com- 
plained of the indisposition of students of nature to look upon the uni- 
verse as a whole. But since the great theory of evolution has been 
brought to general notice no one will be satisfied at knowing a fact 
without also trying to establish its relation to other facts. Therefore a 
working hypothesis, which shall not be held to with tenacity, is not only 
allowable but necessary. It is also important to examine with proper 
respect the theories advanced by others. Some of these, suggested in 
the few publications on the subject and also by correspondents, will be 
mentioned. 
NOT CORRELATED WITH MEAGERNESS OF LANGUAGE. 
The story has been told by travelers in many parts of the world that 
various languages cannot be clearly understood in the dark by their pos- 
sessors, using their mother tongue between themselves. The evidence 
for this anywhere is suspicious; and when it is asserted, as it often has 
been, in reference to some of the tribes of North American Indians, it 
is absolutely false, and must be attributed to the error of travelers who, 
ignorant of the dialect, never see the natives except when trying to 
make themselves intelligible to their visitors by a practice which they 
have found by experience to have been successful with strangers to 
their tongue, or perhaps when they are guarding against being over- 
heard by others. Captain Burton, in his City of the Saints, specially 
states that the Arapahos possess a very scanty vocabulary, pronounced 
in a quasi-unintelligible way, and can hardly converse with one another 
in the dark. The truth is that their vocabulary is by no means scanty, 
and they do converse with each other with perfect freedom without any 
gestures when they so please. The difficulty in speaking or understand- 
ing their language is in the large number of guttural and interrupted 
sounds which are not helped by external motions of the mouth and lips 
in articulation, and the light gives little advantage to its comprehen- 
sion so far as concerns the vocal apparatus, which, in many languages, 
can be seen as well as heard, as is proved by the modern deaf-mute 
practice of artificial speech. The corresponding story that no white 
man eyer learned Arapaho is also false. A member of Frémont’s party 
so long ago as 1842 spoke the language. Burton in the same connection 
