manteRY.] NOT CORRELATED WITH MEAGERNESS OF SPEECH. 815 
gives a story ‘of a man who, being sent among the Cheyennes to qual- 
ify himself for interpreting, returned in a week and proved his compe- 
tency; all he did, however, was to go through the usual pantomime with 
a running accompaniment of grunts.” And he might as well have 
omitted the grunts, for he obviously only used sign language. Lieu- 
tenant Abert, in 1846-47, made much more sensible remarks from his 
actual observation than Captain Burton repeated at second-hand from 
a Mormon met by him at Salt Lake. He said: ‘“‘Some persons think 
that it [the Cheyenne language] would be incomplete without gesture, 
because the Indians use gestures constantly. But I have been assured 
that the language is in itself capable of bodying forth any idea to which 
one may wish to give utterance.” 
In fact, individuals of those American tribes specially instanced in 
these reports as unable to converse without gesture, often, in their 
domestic abandon, wrap themselves up in robes or blankets with only 
breathing holes before the nose, so that no part of the body is seen, and 
chatter away for hours, telling long stories. If in daylight they thus 
voluntarily deprive themselves of the possibility of making signs, it is 
clear that their preference for talks around the fire at night is explicable 
by very natural reasons wholly distinct from the one attributed. The 
inference, once carelessly made from the free use of gesture by some of 
the Shoshonian stock, that their tongue was too meager for use without 
signs, is refuted by the now ascertained fact that their vocabulary is 
remarkably copious and their parts of speech better differentiated than 
those of many people on whom no such stigma has been affixed. The 
proof of this was seen in the writer’s experience, when Ouray, the head 
chief of the Utes, was at Washington, in the early part of 1880, and 
after an interview with the Secretary of the Interior made report of it 
to the rest of the delegation who had not been present. He spoke with- 
out pause in his own language for nearly an hour, in a monotone and 
without a single gesture. The reason for this depressed manner was 
undoubtedly because he was very sad at the result, involving loss of 
land and change of home; but the fact remains that full information 
was communicated on a complicated subject without the aid of a man- 
ual sign, and also without even such change of inflection of voice as is 
common among Europeans. Alltheories based upon the supposed pov- 
erty of American languages must be abandoned. 
The grievous accusation against foreign people that they have no in- 
telligible language is venerable and general. With the Greeks the 
term dyiwacos, “tongueless,” was used synonymous with Pépfapos, ‘bar- 
barian” of all who were not Greek. The name “Slav,” assumed by a 
grand division of the Aryan family, means “the speaker,” and is con- 
tradistinguished from the other peoples of the world, such as the Ger- 
mans, who are called in Russian “ Njemez,” that is, “‘speechless.” In 
Isaiah (xxxiii, 19) the Assyrians are called a people “of a stammering 
tongue, that one cannot understand.” The common use of the expres- 
