346 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
holding the hand arched, fingers separated and pointing forward, and 
pushing the hand forward over a slight curve near the ground, and the 
generic sign for animals by the Apaches is made in the same manner at 
the height intended to represent the object. 
The sign for where ?, and to search, to seek for, made by the Dakota (IV), 
is by holding the back of the hand upward, index pointing forward, 
and carrying it from left to right about eight inches, raising and lower- 
ing it several times while so doing, as if quickly pointing at different 
objects. That for some of them, a part of a number of things or persons, 
made by the Kaiowa, Comanche, Wichita, and Apache Indians is nearly 
identical, the gesture being made less rapidly. 
RESULTS SOUGHT IN THE STUDY OF SIGN LANGUAGE. 
These may be divided into (1) its practical application, (2) its aid to 
philologic researches in general with (3) particular reference to the 
grammatic machinery of language, and (4) its archzeologic relations. 
PRACTICAL APPLICATION. 
The most obvious application of Indian sign language will for its 
practical utility depend, to a large extent, upon the correctness of the 
view submitted by the present writer that it is not a mere semaphoric 
repetition of motions to be memorized from a limited traditional list, 
but is a cultivated art, founded upon principles which can be readily 
applied by travelers and officials, so as to give them much independence 
of professional interpreters—as a class dangerously deceitful and tricky. 
This advantage is not merely theoretical, but has been demonstrated to 
be practical by a professor in a deaf mute college who, lately visiting 
several ot the wild tribes of the plains, made himself understood among 
all of them without knowing a word of any of their languages; nor 
would it only be experienced in connection with American tribes, being 
applicable to intercourse with savages in Africa and Asia, though it is 
not pretended to fulfill by this agency the schoolmen’s dream of an 
ecumenical mode of communication between all peoples in spite of their 
dialectic divisions. 
It must be admitted that the practical value of signs for intercourse 
with the American Indians will not long continue, their general progress 
in the acquisition of English or of Spanish being so rapid that those 
languages are becoming, to a surprising extent, the common medium, 
and signs are proportionally disused. Nor is a systematic use of signs 
of so great assistance in communicating with foreigners, whose speech is 
not understood, as might at first be supposed, unless indeed both par- 
ties agree to cease all attempt at oral language, relying wholly upon 
gestures. So long as words are used at all, signs will be made only as 
their accompaniment, and they will not always be ideographic, 
