RESULT IN MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING. 39 



ing the code in which the other was educated and which lie had before prac- 

 ticed, one being mutually devisedfor theoccasion, and those specially designed 

 for secrecy are often deciphered. So, if any one of the more approximately 

 conventional signs is not quickly comprehended, an Indian skilled in the 

 principle of signs resorts to another expression of his flexible art, perhaps 

 reproducing the gesture unabbreviated and made more graphic, perhaps 

 presenting either the same or another conception or quality of the same 

 object or idea by an original portraiture. The same tribe has, indeed, in 

 some instances, as appears by the collected lists, a choice already furnished 

 by tradition or importation, or recent invention or all together, of several 

 signs for the same thought-object. Thus there are produced synonyms as 

 well as dialects in sign-language. 



The general result is that two intelligent mimes seldom fail of mutual 

 understanding, their attention being exclusively directed to the expression 

 of thoughts by the means of comprehension and reply equally possessed by 

 both, without the mental confusion of conventional sounds only intelligible 

 to one. The Indians who have been shown over the civilized East have also 

 often succeeded in holding intercourse, by means of their invention and 

 application of principles, in what may be called the voiceless mother utter- 

 ance, with white deaf-mutes, who surely have no semiotic code more nearly 

 connected with that attributed to the plain-roamers than is derived from 

 their common humanity. When they met together they were found to pur- 

 sue the same course as that noticed at the meeting together of deaf-mutes 

 who were either not instructed in any methodical dialect or who had received 

 such instruction by different methods. They seldom agreed in the signs at 

 first presented, but soon understood them, and finished by adopting some 

 in mutual compromise, which proved to be those most strikingly appro- 

 priate, graceful, and convenient, but there still remained in some cases a 

 plurality of fitting signs for the same idea or object, On one of the most 

 interesting of these occasions, at the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf 

 and Dumb, in 1873, it was remarked that the signs of the deaf-mutes were 

 much more readily understood by the Indians,, who were Absaroki or 

 Crows, Arapahos, and Cheyennes, than were theirs by the deaf-mutes, and 

 that the latter greatly excelled in pantomimic effect. This need not be sur- 



