38 SIGN-LANGUAGE AS AN INDIAN ART. 



ing to the published views of the present writer, which seem to have been 

 favorably received), the immense number of languages and dialects still pre- 

 served, or known by early recorded fragments to have once existed, so sub- 

 divided it that but the dwellers in a very few villages could talk together 

 with ease, and all were interdistributed among unresponsive vernaculars, 

 each to the other being bar-bar-ous in every meaning of the term. It is, 

 however, noticeable that the three great families of Iroquois, Algonkin, and 

 Muskoki, when met by their first visitors, do not appear to have often im- 

 pressed the latter with their reliance upon gesture-language to the same 

 extent as has always been reported of the aborigines now and formerly 

 found farther inland. If this absence of report arose from the absence of 

 the practice and not from imperfection of observation, an explanation may 

 be suggested from the fact that among those families there were more 

 people dwelling near together in sociological communities, of the same 

 speech, though with dialectic peculiarities, than became known later in the 

 later West, and not being nomadic, their intercourse with strange tribes 

 was less individual and conversational. 



The use of gesture-signs, continued, if not originating, in necessity for 

 communication with the outer world, became entribally convenient from the 

 habits of hunters, the main occupation of all savages, depending largely 

 upon stealthy approach to game, and from the sole form of their military 

 tactics — to surprise an enemy. In the still expanse of virgin forests, and 

 especially in the boundless solitudes of the great plains, a slight sound can 

 be heard over a vast area, that of the human voice being from its rarity the 

 most startling, so that it is now, as it probably has been for centuries, a 

 common precaution for members of a hunting or war party not to speak 

 together when on such expeditions, communicating exclusively by signs. 

 The acquired habit also exhibits itself not only in formal oratory, but in 

 impassioned or emphatic conversation. 



This domestic as well as foreign exercise for generations in the gesture- 

 language has naturally produced great skill both in expression and reception, 

 so as to be measurably independent of any prior mutual understanding, or 

 what in a system of signals is called preconcert, Two accomplished army 

 signalists can, after sufficient trial, communicate without either of them learn- 



