MALLERY.] SIGN LANGUAGE AND PICTURE-WRITING CONNECTED. 27 
suggest letters of indigenous invention, This topic is discussed in its 
place. 
For the purposes of the present work there is no need to decide 
whether sign-language, which is closely connected with picture-writing, 
preceded articulate speech. It is sufficient to admit the high antiquity 
of thought-writing in both its forms, and yet it is proper to notice a 
strong current of recent opinions as indicated by Prof. Sayce (a) in his 
address to the anthroplologic section of the British Association for the 
Advancement of Science, as follows: 
T see no escape from the conclusions that the chief distinctions of race were estab- 
lished long before man acquired language. If the statement made by M. de Mortillet 
is true, that the absence of the mental tubercle, or bony exerescence in which the 
tongue is inserted, in a skull of the Neanderthal type found at La Naulette, indicates 
an absence of the faculty of speech, one race at least of paleolithic man would have 
existed in Europe before it had as yet invented an articulate language. Indeed it is 
difficult to believe that man has known how to speak for any very great length of time. 
* * * We can still trace through the thin disguise of subsequent modifications 
and growth the elements, both lexical and grammatical, out of which language must 
have arisen. * * * The beginnings of articulate language are still too trans- 
parent to allow us to refer them to a veryremoteera. * *“ * In fact the evidence 
that he is a drawing animal * * * mounts back to a much earlier epoch than 
the evidence that he is a speaking animal. 
When a system of ideographic gesture signs prevailed and at the 
same time any form of artistic representation, however rude, existed, it 
would be expected that the delineations of the former would appear in 
the latter. It was but one more and an easy step to fasten upon bark, 
skins, or rocks the evanescent air pictures that still in pigments or 
carvings preserve their ideography or conventionalism in their original 
outlines. A transition stage between gestures and pictographs, in 
which the left hand is used as a supposed drafting surface, upon which 
the index draws lines, is exhibited in the Dialogue between Alaskan 
Indians in the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (a). 
This device is common among deaf-mutes, without equal archeologic 
importance, as it may have been suggested by the art of writing, with 
which, even when not instructed in it, they are generally acquainted. 
The execution of the drawings, of which the several forms of picture- 
writing are composed, often exhibits the first crude efforts of graphic 
art, and their study in that relation is of value. 
When pictures are employed for the same purpose as writing, the 
conception intended to be presented is generally analyzed and only its 
most essential points are indicated, with the result that the characters 
when frequently repeated become conventional, and in their later form 
cease to be recognizable as objective portraitures. This exhibition of 
conventionalizing has its own historic import. 
It is not probable that much valuable information will ever be ob- 
tained from ancient rock carvings or paintings, but they are important 
as indications of the grades of culture reached by their authors, 
and of the subjects which interested those authors, as is shown 
