348 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
ingale. Successful signs must have a much closer analogy and establish 
a consensus between the talkers far beyond that produced by the mere 
sound of words. 
Gestures, in the degree of their pantomimic character, excel in graphic 
and dramatic effect applied to narrative and to rhetorical exhibition, and 
beyond any other mode of description give the force of reality. Speech, 
when highly cultivated, is better adapted to generalization and abstrac- 
tion; therefore to logic and metaphysics. The latter must ever hence- 
forth be the superior in formulating thoughts. Some of the enthusiasts 
in signs have contended that this unfavorable distinction is not from 
any inherent incapability, but because their employment has not been 
continued unto perfection, and that if they had been elaborated by the 
secular labor devoted to spoken language they might in resources and 
distinctiveness have exceeded many forms of the latter. Gallaudet, Peet, 
and others may be right in asserting that man could by his arms, hands, 
and fingers, with facial and bodily accentuation, express any idea that 
could be conveyed by words. 
The combinations which can be.made with corporeal signs are infinite. 
It has been before argued that a high degree of culture might have 
been attained by man without articulate speech and it is but a further step 
in the reasoning to conclude that if articulate speech had not been pos- 
sessed or acquired, necessity would have developed gesture language 
to a degree far beyond any known exhibition of it. The continually 
advancing civilization and continually increasing intercourse of count- 
less ages has perfected oral speech, and as both civilization and inter- 
course were possible with signs alone it is to be supposed that they 
would have advanced in some corresponding manner. But as sign lan- 
guage has been chiefly used during historic time either as a scaffolding 
around amore valuable structure to be thrown aside when the latter was 
completed, or as an occasional substitute, such development was not to 
be expected. . 
The process of forming signs to express abstract ideas is only a variant 
from that of oral speech, in which the words for the most abstract ideas, 
such as law, virtue, infinitude, and immortality, are shown by Max Miul- 
ler to have been derived and deduced, that is, abstracted, from sensuous 
impressions. In the use of signs the countenance and manner as well as 
the tenor decide whether objects themselves are intended, or the forms, 
positions, qualities, and motions of other objects which are suggested, 
and signs for moral and intellectual ideas, founded on analogies, are 
common all over the world as well as among deaf-mutes. Concepts of 
the intangible and invisible are only learned through percepts of tan- 
gible and visible objects, whether finally expressed to the eye or to the 
ear, in terms of sight or of sound. 
Sign language is so faithful to nature, and so essentially living i in its 
expression, that it is not probable that it will ever die. It may become 
disused, but will revert. Its elements are ever natural and universal, by 
recurring to which the less natural signs adopted dialectically or for 
