390 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
COMPARISONS WITH FOREIGN SIGNS. 
The generalization of TyLor that “ gesture language is substantially 
the same among savage tribes all over the world,” interpreted by his 
remarks in another connection, is understood as referring to their com- 
mon use of signs, and of signs formed on the same principles, but not 
of precisely the same signs to express the same ideas. In this sense of 
the generalization the result of the writer’s study not only sustains it, 
but shows a surprising number of signs for the same idea which are sub- 
stantially identical, not only among savage tribes, but among all peo- 
ples that use gesture signs with any freedom. Men, in groping for a 
mode of communication with each other, and using the same general 
methods, have been under many varying conditions and circumstances 
which have determined differently many conceptions and their semiotic 
execution, but there have also been many of both which were similar. 
Our Indians have no special superstition concerning the evil-eye like 
the Italians, nor have they been long familiar with the jackass so as to 
make him emblematical of stupidity; therefore signs for these concepts 
are not cisatlantic, but even in this paper many are shown which are 
substantially in common between our Indians and Italians. The large 
collection already obtained, but not now published, shows many others 
identical, not only with those of the Italians and the classic Greeks and 
Romans, but of other peoples of the Old World, both savage and civil- 
ized. The generic uniformity is obvious, while the occasion of specific 
varieties can be readily understood. 
COMPARISON WITH DEAF-MUTE SIGNS. 
The Indians who have been shown over the civilized East have often 
succeeded in holding intercourse, by means of their invention and ap- 
plication of principles in what may be called the voiceless mother utter- 
ance, with white deaf-mutes, who surely have no semiotic code more 
nearly connected with that attributed to the plain-roamers than is de- 
rived from their common humanity. They showed the greatest pleasure 
in meeting deaf-mutes, precisely as travelers in a foreign country are 
rejoiced to neet persons speaking their language, with whom they can 
hold direct communication without the tiresome and often suspected 
medium of an interpreter. When they met together they were found to 
pursue the same course as that noticed at the meeting of deaf-mutes 
who were either not instructed in any methodical dialect or who had 
received such instruction by different methods. They often disagreed 
in the signs at first presented, but soon understood them, and finished 
by adopting some in mutual compromise, which proved to be those most 
strikingly appropriate, graceful, and convenient; but there. still re- 
mained in some eases a plurality of fitting signs for the same idea or 
object. On one of the most interesting of these occasions, at the Penn- 
sylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, in 1873, it was remarked 
that the signs of the deaf-mutes were much more readily understood 
