SURVIVAL IN CONVERSATIONAL GESTURES. 41 



obtained from that tribe. Further discouragement came from an Indian 

 agent giving the decided statement, after four years of intercourse with the 

 Pah-Utes, that no such thing as a communication by signs was known or 

 even remembered by them, which, however, was less difficult to bear because 

 on the day of the receipt of that well-intentioned missive some officers of 

 the Bureau of Ethnology were actually talking in signs with a delegation 

 of that very tribe of Indians then in Washington, from one of whom the 

 Story hereinafter appearing was received. The difficulty in collecting signs 

 may arise because Indians are often provokingly reticent about their old 

 habits and traditions; because they do not distinctly comprehend what is 

 sought to be obtained, and because sometimes the art, abandoned in gen- 

 eral, only remains in the memories of a few persons influenced by special 

 circumstances or individual fancy. 



In this latter regard a comparison may be made with the old science 

 of heraldry, once of practical use and a necessary part of a liberal educa- 

 tion, of which hardly a score of persons in the United States have any but 

 the vague knowledge that it once existed; yet the united memories of those 

 persons could, in the absence of records, reproduce all essential points on 

 the subject. 



Even when the specific practice of the sign-language has been generally 

 discontinued for more than one generation, either from the adoption of a 

 jargon or from the common use of the tongue of the conquering English, 

 French, or Spanish, some of the gestures formerly employed as substitutes 

 for words may survive as a customary accompaniment to oratory or impas- 

 sioned conversation, and, when ascertained, should be carefully noted. An 

 example, among many, may be found in the fact that the now civilized 

 Muskoki or Creeks, as mentioned by Rev. H. F. Bucknee, when speaking 

 of the height of children or women, illustrate their words by holding their 

 hands at the proper elevation, palm up; but when describing the height of 

 "soulless" animals or inanimate objects, they hold the palm downward. 

 This, when correlated with the distinctive signs of other Indians, is an inter- 

 esting case of the survival of a practice which, so far as yet reported, the 

 oldest men of the tribe now living only remember to have once existed. 

 It is probable that a collection of such distinctive gestures among even the 



