350 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
his Collectanea Htymologica, without hitherto exciting any thorough or 
scientific work in that direction, the obstacle to it probably being that 
scholars competent in other respects had no adequate data of the gesture 
speech of man to be used in comparison. The latter will, it is hoped, be 
supplied by the work now undertaken. 
In the first part of this paper it was suggested that signs played an 
important part in giving meaning to spoken words. Philology, com- 
paring the languages of earth in their radicals, must therefore include 
the graphic or manual presentation of thought, and compare the ele- 
ments of ideography with those of phonics. Etymology now examines 
the ultimate roots, not the fanciful resemblances between oral forms, 
in the different tongues; the internal, not the mere external parts of 
language. A marked peculiarity of sign language consists in its limited 
number of radicals and the infinite combinations into which those 
radicals enter while still remaining distinctive. It is therefore a proper 
field for etymologic study. 
From these and other considerations it is supposed that an analysis 
of the original conceptions of gestures, studied together with the holo- 
phrastic roots in the speech of the gesturers, may aid in the ascertainment 
of some relation between concrete ideas and words. Meaning does not 
adhere to the phonic presentation of thought, while it does to signs. The 
latter are doubtless more flexible and in that sense more mutable than 
words, but the ideas at:ached to them are persistent, and therefore there 
is not much greater metamorphosis in the signs than in the cognitions. 
The further a language has been developed from its primordial roots, 
which have been twisted into forms no longer suggesting any reason for 
their original selection, and the more the primitive significance of its 
words has disappeared, the fewer points of contact can it retain with 
signs. The higher languages are more precise.because the conscious- 
ness of the derivation of most of their words is lost, so that they have 
become counters, good for any sense agreed upon and for no other. 
It is, however, possible to ascertain the included gesture even in many 
English words. The class represented by the word supercilious will occur 
to all readers, but one or two examples may be given not so obvious and 
more immediately connected with the gestures of our Indians. Imbecile, 
generally applied to the weakness of old age, is derived from the Latin 
in, in the sense of on, and bacillum, a staff, which at once recalls the Chey- 
enne sign for old man, mentioned above, page 339. So time appears 
more nearly connected with reiw, to stretch, when information is given 
‘of the sign for long time, in the Speech of Kin Ché-éss, in this paper, viz., 
placing the thumbs and forefingers in such a position as if a small thread 
was held between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, the hands first 
touching each other, and then moving slowly from each other, as if 
stretching a piece of guin-elastic. 
In the languages of North America, which have not become arbitrary 
to the degree exhibited by those of civilized man, the connection be- 
