MALLERY.] GESTURE SIGNS IN PICTOGRAPHS. 637 
them, symbols, which could never have been entertained by a people in 
the stage of culture of the Ojibwa, and those devices, in fact, were ideo- 
grams or iconograms. 
SECTION 4. 
GESTURE AND POSTURE SIGNS DEPICTED. 
Among people where a system of ideographic gesture signs has pre- 
vailed it would be expected that their form would appear in any mode 
of pictorial representation used with the object of conveying ideas or 
recording facts. When a gesture sign had been established and it 
became necessary or desirable to draw a character or design to convey 
the same idea, nothing could be more natural than to use the graphic 
form or delineation which was known and used in the gesture sign. It 
was but one more step, and an easy one, to fasten upon bark, skins, or 
rocks the evanescent air pictures of the signs. 
In the paper “Sign language among the North American Indians,” 
published in the First Ann. Rep. of the Bureau of Ethnology, a large 
number of instances were given of the reproduction of gesture lines in 
the pictographs made by those Indians, and they appeared to be most 
frequent when there was an attempt to convey subjective ideas. It 
was suggested, therefore, that those pictographs which, in the absence 
of positive knowledge, are the most difficult of interpretation were 
those to which the study of sign-language might be applied with ad- 
vantage. The topic is now more fully discussed. Many pictographs 
in the present work, the meaning of which is definitely known from 
direct sources, are noted in connection with the gesture-signs corre- 
sponding with the same idea, which signs are also understood from 
independent evidence or legitimate deduction. 
Dr. Edkins (c) makes the following remarks regarding the Chinese 
characters, which are applicable also to the picture-writing of the North 
American Indians, and indeed to that of all peoples among whom it 
has been cultivated : 
The use of simple natural shapes, such as the mouth, nose, eye, ear, hand, foot, as 
well as the shape of branches, trees, grass, caves, holes, rivers, the bow, the spear, 
the knife, the tablet, the leaf—these formed, in addition to pictures of animals, 
much of the staple of Chinese ideographs. 
Attention should be drawn to the fact that the mouth and the hand play an ex- 
ceptionally important part in the formation of the symbols. 
Men were more accustomed then than now to the language of signs by the use of 
these organs. Perhaps three-twentieths of the existing characters are formed by 
their help as one element. 
This large use of the mouth and hand in forming characters is, as we may very 
reasonably suppose, only a repetition of what took place when the words themselves . 
were made. 
There is likely to be a primitive connection between demonstratives and names for 
the hand, because the hand is used in pointing. 
Fig. 983 is a copy of a colored petroglyph on a rock in the valley of 
Tule river, California, further described on page 52, et seq., supra. 
