MALLERY.] ALLEGED IDENTITY OF SIGNS. 335 
alone of all modes of utterance can be, it must be tentative, experimental, 
and flexible. The mutes will also resort to the invention of new signs 
for new ideas as they arise, which will be made intelligible, if necessary, 
through the illustration and definition given by signs formerly adopted, 
so that the fittest signs will be evolved, after rivalry and trial, and will 
survive. But there may not always be such a preponderance of fitness 
that all but one of the rival signs shall die out, and some, being equal in 
ralue to express the same idea or object, will continue to be used indiffer- 
ently, or as a matter of individual taste, without confusion. A multipli- 
cation of the numbers confined together, either of deaf-mutes or of In- 
dians whose speech is diverse, will not decrease the resulting uniformity, 
though it will increase both the copiousness and the precision of the 
vocabulary. The Indian use of signs, though maintained by linguistic 
diversities, is not coincident with any linguistic boundaries. The tend- 
ency is to their uniformity among groups of people who from any cause 
are brought into contdct with each other while still speaking different 
languages. The longer and closer such contact, while no common tongue 
is adopted, the greater will be the uniformity of signs. 
Colonel Dodge takes a middle ground with regard to the identity of 
the signs used by our Indians, comparing it with the dialects and pro- 
vincialisms of the English language, as spoken in England, Ireland, 
Scotland, and Wales. But those dialects are the remains of actually 
diverse languages, which to some speakers have not become integrated. 
In England alone the provincial dialects are traceable as the legacies of 
Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Danes, with a varying amount of Norman in- 
fluence. A thorough scholar in the composite tongue, now called Eng- 
lish, will be able to understand all the dialects and provincialisms of 
English in the British Isles, but the uneducated man of Yorkshire is not 
able to communicate readily with the equally uneducated man of Somer- 
setshire. This is the true distinction to be made. <A thorough sign talker 
would be able to talk with several Indians who have no signs in common, 
and who, if their knowledge of signs were only memorized, could not com- 
municate together. So also, as an educated Englishman will understand 
the attempts of a foreigner to speak in very imperfect and broken English, 
a good Indian sign expert will apprehend the feeble efforts of a tyro in gest- 
ures. But Colonel Dodge’s conclusion that there is but one true Indian 
sign language, just as there is but one true English language, isnot proved 
unless it can be shown that a much larger proportion of the Indians 
who use signs at all, than present researches show to be the case, use 
identically the same signs to express the same ideas. It would also seem 
necessary to the parallel that the signs so used should be absolute, if not 
arbitrary, as are the words of an oral language, and not independent of 
preconcert and self-interpreting at the instant of their invention or first 
exhibition,as all true signs must originally have been and still measurably 
remain. All Indians, as all gesturing men, have many natural signs in 
common and many others which are now conventional. The conventions 
