SINGLE SIGNS. 59 



guages. This division is not appropriate to the signs of Indians, which are 

 all natural in this sense, and in their beauty, grace, and impressiveness. In 

 another meaning of " natural," given by deaf-mute authorities, it has little 

 distinction from "innate," and still another, "conveying the meaning at first 

 sight," is hardly definite. 



The signs of our Indians may be divided, in accordance with the mode 

 of their consideration, into innate (generally emotional) and invented ; into 

 developed and abridged ; into radical and derivative ; and into, 1. Indica- 

 tive, as directly as possible of the object intended; 2. Imitative, represent- 

 ing it by configurative drawing ; 3. Operative, referring to actions ; and 

 4. Expressive, being chiefly facial. As they are rhetorically as well as 

 directly figurative, they may be classified under the tropes of metaphor, 

 synecdoche, metonymy, and catachresis, with as much or as little advantage 

 as has been gained by the labeling in text-books of our figures of articulate 

 speech. 



The most useful division, however, for the analysis and report with 

 which collectors are concerned is into single and compound, each including 

 a number of subordinate groups, examples of which will be useful. Some 

 of those here submitted are taken from the selected list before introduced 

 to discriminate between the alleged universality of the signs themselves and 

 of their use as an art, and the examples of deaf-mute signs have been 

 extracted from those given for the same purpose by Mgr. D. De Haeene in 

 his admirable analysis of those signs, which also has been used so far as ap- 

 plicable. Those will be equally illustrative, both the Indian and deaf-mute 

 signs being but dialects of a common stock, and while all the examples might 

 be taken from the collection of Indian signs already made, the main object 

 of the present work is to verify and correct that collection rather than to 

 publish more of it than necessary, with possible perpetuation of error in 

 some details. 



SINGLE SIGNS. 



Single signs have been often styled " simple," which term is objection- 

 able because liable to be confounded with the idea of " plain," in which 

 sense nearly all Indian signs, being natural, are simple They are such 



