MALLERY.] TENDENCY TO UNIFORMITY. 333 
sign language than with their other members, and those experts, on 
account of their skill as interpreters, are selected as guides to accom- 
pany the visitors. The latter also seek occasion to be present when 
signs are used, whether with or without words, in intertribal councils, 
and then the same class of experts comprises the orators, for long exer- 
cise in gesture speech has made the Indian politicians, with no special 
effort, masters of the art acquired by our public speakers only after 
laborious apprenticeship. The whole theory and practice of sign lan- 
guage being that all who understand its principles can make themselves 
mutually intelligible, the fact of the ready comprehension and response 
among all the skilled gesturers gives the impression of a common code. 
Furthermore, if the explorer learn to employ with ingenuity the signs used 
by any of the tribes, he will probably be understood in any other by the 
same class of persons who will surround him in the latter, thereby con- 
firming him in the “common” theory. Those of the tribe who are less 
skilled, but who are not noticed, might be unable to catch the meaning 
of signs which have not been actually taught to them, just as ignorant 
persons among us cannot derive any sense from newly-coined words or 
those strange to their habitual vocabulary, which, though never before 
heard, linguistic scholars would instantly understand and might after- 
ward adopt. 
It is also common experience that when Indians find that a sign which 
has become conventional among their tribe is not understood by an inter- 
locutor, aself-expressive sign is substituted for it, from which a visitor may 
form the impression that there are no conventional signs. It may like- 
wise occur that the self-expressive sign substituted will be met with by 
a visitor in several localities, different Indians, in their ingenuity, taking 
the best and the same means of reaching the exotic intelligence. 
There is some evidence that where sign language is now found among 
Indian tribes it has become more uniform than ever before, simply because 
many tribes have for some time past been forced to dwell near together 
at peace. A collection was obtained in the spring of 1880, at Washing- 
ton, from a united delegation of the Kaiowa, Comanche, Apache, and 
Wichita tribes, which was nearly uniform, but the individuals who gave 
the signs had actually lived together at or near Anadarko, Indian Ter- 
ritory, for a considerable time, and the resulting uniformity of their signs 
might either be considered as a jargon or as the natural tendency to 
a compromise for mutual understanding—the unification so often ob- 
served in oral speech, coming under many circumstances out of former 
heterogeneity. The rule is that dialects precede languages and that out 
of many dialects comes onelanguage. It may be found that other indi- 
viduals of those same tribes who have from any cause not lived in the 
union explained may have signs for the same ideas different from those 
in the collection above mentioned. This is probable, because some signs 
of other representatives of one of the component bodies—A pache—have 
actually been reported differing from those for the same ideas given by 
