MALLERY.] MISTAKEN AND FORCED SIGNS. 337 
civilized understanding of them may be mistaken or forced. The liabil- 
ity to those errors is much increased when the collections are not taken 
directly from the Indians themselves, but are given as obtained at sec- 
ond-hand from white traders, trappers, and interpreters, who, through 
misconception in the beginning and their own introduction or modifica- 
tion of gestures, have produced a jargon in the sign, as well as in the 
oral intercourse. An Indian talking in signs, either to a white man or 
to another Indian using signs which he never saw before, catches the 
meaning of that which is presented and adapts himself to it, at least 
for the occasion. Even when he finds that his interlocutor insists upon 
understanding and presenting a certain sign in amanner and with a sig- 
‘nificance widely different from those to which he has been accustomed, 
it is within the very nature, tentative and elastic, of the gesture 
art—both performers being on an equality—that he should adopt the 
one that seems to be recognized or that is pressed upon him, as with 
much greater difficulty he has learned and adopted many foreign terms 
used with whites before attempting to acquire their language, but never 
with his own race. Thus there is now, and perhaps always has been, 
what may be called a lingua-franca in the sign vocabulary. It is well 
known that all the tribes of the Plains having learned by experience 
that white visitors expect to receive certain signs really originating with 
the latter, use them in their intercourse just as they sometimes do the 
words “squaw” and ‘‘ papoose,” corruptions of the Algonkian, and once 
as meaningless in the present West as the English terms ‘ woman” and 
“child,” but which the first pioneers, having learned them on the At- 
lantice coast, insisted upon treating as generally intelligible. 
The perversity in attaching through preconceived views a wrong sig- 
nificance to signs is illustrated by an anecdote found in several versions 
and in several languages, but repeated as a veritable Scotch legend by 
Dunean Anderson, esq., Principal of the Glasgow Institution for the 
Deaf and Dumb, when he visited Washington in 1853. 
King James I. of England, desiring to play a trick upon the Spanish 
ambassador, a man of great erudition, but who had a crotchet in his 
head upon sign language, informed him that there was a distinguished 
professor of that science in the university at Aberdeen. The ambassa- 
dor set out for that place, preceded by a letter from the King with in- 
structions to make the best of him. There was in the town one Geordy, 
a butcher, blind of one eye, a fellow of much wit and drollery. Geordy 
is told to play the part of a professor, with the warning not to speak a 
word; is gowned, wigged, and placed in a chair of state, when the am- 
bassador is shown in and they are left alone together. Presently the 
nobleman came out greatly pleased with the experiment, claiming that 
his theory was demonstrated. He said: ‘“* When I[ entered the room I 
raised one finger to signify there is one God. He replied by raising two 
fingers to signify that this Being rules over two worlds, the material 
and the spiritual. Then I raised three fingers, to say there are three 
