398 SIGN LANGUAGE AMONG NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
in space, either by written description or illustrated cuts, that no text 
books are used. I must therefore conclude that the Indian sign lan- 
guage is not only the more natural, but the more simple, as the gestures 
can be described quite accurately in writing, and I think can be illus- 
trated.” The readers of this paper will also, probably, “think” that 
the signs of Indians can be illustrated, and as the signs of deaf-mutes 
are often identical with the Indian, whether expressing the same or 
different ideas, and when not precisely identical are always made on 
the same principle and with the same members, it is not easy to imagine 
any greater difficulty either in their graphic illustration or in their writ- 
ten description. The assertion is as incorrect as if it were paraphrased 
to declare that a portrait of an Indian in a certain attitude could be 
taken by a pencil or with the camera while by some occult influence the 
same artistic skill would be paralysed in attempting that of a deaf- 
mute in the same attitude. In fact, text books on the “ French system” 
are used and one in the writer’s possession published in Paris twenty- 
five years ago, contains over four hundred illustrated cuts of deaf-mute 
gesture signs. 
The proper arrangement and classification of signs will always be 
troublesome and unsatisfactory. There can be no accurate translation 
either of sentences or of words from signs into written English. So far 
from the signs representing words as logographs, they do not in their 
presentation of the ideas of actions, objects, and events, under physical 
forms, even suggest words, which must be skillfully fitted to them by 
the glossarist and laboriously derived from them by the philologer. The 
use of words in formulation, still more in terminology, is so wide a de- 
parture from primitive conditions as to be incompatible with the only 
primordial language yet discovered. No vocabulary of signs will be 
exhaustive for the simple reason that the signs are exhaustless, nor will 
it be exact because there cannot be a correspondence between signs and 
words taken individually. Not only do words and signs both change 
their meaning from the context, but a single word may express a com- 
plex idea, to be fully rendered only by a group of signs, and, vice versa, 
a single sign may suffice for a number of words. ‘The elementary prin- 
ciples by which the combinations in sign and in the oral languages of 
civilization are effected are also discrepant. The attempt must there- 
fore be made to collate and compare the signs according to general ideas, 
conceptions, and, if possible, the ideas and conceptions of the gesturers 
themselves, instead of in order of words as usually arranged in diction- 
aries. 
The hearty thanks of the writer are rendered to all his collaborators, 
a list of whom is given below, and will in future be presented in a man- 
ner more worthy of them. It remains to give an explanation of the 
mode in which a large collection of signs has been made directly by the 
officers of the Bureau of Ethnology. Fortunately for this undertaking, 
the policy of the government brought to Washington during the year 
