368 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
individual interrogated, with or without lateral oscillating motion; the 
gestural sentence, when completed, being closed by the same sign and 
a look of inquiry. This recalls the Spanish use of the interrogation 
points before and after the question. 
Period. 
A Hidatsa, after concluding a short statement, indicated its conclusion 
by placing the inner edges of the clinched hands together before the 
breast, and passing them outward and downward to their respective 
sides in an emphatic manner, Fig. 334, page 528. This sign is also used 
in other connections to express done. 
The same mode of indicating the close of a narrative or statement is 
made by the Wichitas, by holding the extended left hand horizontally 
before the body, fingers pointing to the right, palm either toward the 
body or downward, and cutting edgewise downward past the tips of the 
left with the extended right hand. ‘This is the same sign given in the 
ADDRESS OF Kin CHE-iss as cut off, and is illustrated in Fig. 324, page 
522. This is more ideographic and convenient than the device of the 
Abyssinian Galla, reported by M. A. d@Abbadie, who denoted a comma 
by a slight stroke of a leather whip, a semicolon by a harder one, and 
a full stop by one still harder. 
GESTURES AIDING ARCHAOLOGIC RESEARCH. 
The most interesting light in which the Indians of North America 
can be regarded is in their present representation of a stage of evolu- 
tion once passed through by our own ancestors. Their signs, as well as 
their myths and customs, form a part of the paleontology of humanity to 
be studied in the history of the latter as the geologist, with similar ob- 
ject, studies all the strata of the physical world. At this time it is only 
possible to suggest the application of gesture signs to elucidate picto- 
graphs, and also their examination to discover religious, sociologic, and 
historic ideas preserved in them, as has been done with great success in 
the radicals of oral speech. 
SIGNS CONNECTED WITH PICTOGRAPHS. 
The picture writing of Indians is the sole form in which they recorded 
events and ideas that can ever be interpreted without the aid of a tra- 
ditional key, such as is required for the signification of the wampum 
belts of the Northeastern tribes and the quippus of Peru. Strips ot 
bark, tablets of wood, dressed skins of animals, and the smooth sur- 
faces of rock have been and still are used for such records, those most 
ancient, and therefore most interesting, being of course the rock etch- 
ings; but they can only be deciphered, if at all, by the ascertained 
principles on which the more modern and the more obvious are made. 
Many of the numerous and widespread rock carvings are mere idle 
sketches of natural objects, mainly animals, and others are as exclu. 
