MALLERY.] POWERS OF SIGNS AND SPEECH COMPARED. 349 
expedition can always, with some circumlocution, be explained. This 
power of interpreting itself is a peculiar advantage, for spoken languages, 
unless explained by gestures or indications, can only be interpreted by 
means of some other spoken language. When highly cultivated, its 
rapidity on familiar subjects exceeds that of speech and approaches to 
that of thought itself. This statement may be startling to those who 
only notice that a selected spoken word may convey in an instant a 
meaning for which the motions of even an expert in signs may require 
a much longer time, but it must be considered that oral speech is now 
wholly conventional, and that with the similar development of sign lan- 
guage conventional expressions with hands and body could be made 
more quickly than with the vocal organs, because more organs could be 
worked at once. Without such supposed development the habitual 
communication between deaf-mutes and among Indians using signs is 
perhaps as rapid as between the ignorant class of speakers upon the 
same subjects, and in many instances the signs would win at a trial of 
speed. At the same time it must be admitted that great increase in 
rapidity is chiefly obtained by the system of preconcerted abbreviations, 
before explained, and by the adoption of arbitrary forms, in which nat- 
uralness is sacrificed and conventionality established, as has been the 
case with all spoken languages in the degree in which they have become 
copious and convenient. : 
There is another characteristic of the gesture speech that, though it 
cannot be resorted to in the dark, nor where the attention of the person 
addressed has not been otherwise attracted, it has the countervailing 
benefit of use when the voice could not be employed. This may be an ad- 
vantage at a distance which the eye can reach, but not the ear, and still 
more frequently when silence or secrecy is desired. Dalgarno rec- 
ommends it for use in. the presence of great people, who ought not to 
be disturbed, and curiously enough “ Disappearing Mist,” the Lroquois 
chief, speaks of the former extensive use of signs in his tribe by women 
and boys as a mark of respect to warriors and elders, their voices, in 
the good old days, not being uplifted in the presence of the latter. The 
decay of that wholesome state of discipline, he thinks, accounts partly 
for the disappearance of the use of signs among the modern impudent 
youth and the dusky claimants of woman’s rights. 
An instance of the additional power gained to a speaker of ordinary 
language by the use of signs, impressed the writer while dictating to 
two amanuenses at the same moment, to the one by signs and the other 
by words, on different subjects, a practice which would have enabled 
Cesar to surpass his celebrated feat. It would also be easy to talk to 
a deaf and blind man at once, the latter being addressed by the voice 
and the former in signs. 
RELATIONS TO PHILOLOGY. 
The aid to be derived from the study of sign language in prosecuting 
researches into the science of language was pointed out by LETBNITZ, in 
