14 PROCESS SAME AS AMONG DEAF-MUTES. 



many of them became forgotten and were reinvented. Their prevalence 

 and permanence were determined by the experience of their utility, and it 

 would be highly interesting to ascertain how long a time was required for 

 a distinctly new conception or execution to gain currency, become "the 

 fashion," so to speak,, over a large part of the continent, and to be sup- 

 planted by a new " mode." 



The process is precisely the same as among the deaf-mutes. 0«e of 

 those, living among his speaking relatives, may invent signs which the 

 latter are taught to understand, though strangers sometimes will not, be- 

 cause they may be by no means the fittest expressions. Should a dozen or 

 more deaf-mutes, possessed only of such crude signs, come together, they 

 will be able at first to communicate only on a few common subjects, but 

 the number of those and the general scope of expression will be continually 

 enlarged. They will also resort to the invention of new signs for new 

 ideas as they arise, which will be made intelligible, if necessary, through 

 the illustration and definition given by signs formally adopted, so that the 

 fittest signs will be evolved, after mutual trial, and will survive. A multi- 

 plication of the numbers confined together, either of deaf-mutes or of Indians 

 whose speech is diverse, will not decrease the resulting uniformity, though 

 it will increase both the copiousness and the precision of the vocabulary. 

 The only one of the correspondents of the present writer who remains 

 demonstratively unconvinced of the diversities in Indian sign-language, 

 perhaps became prejudiced when in charge of a reservation where Arap- 

 ahos, Cheyennes, and Sioux had for a considerable time been kept secluded, 

 so far as could be done by governmental power, from the outer world, and 

 where naturally their signs were modified so as to become common property. 



Sometimes signs, doubtless once air-pictures of the most striking out- 

 line of an object, or of the most characteristic features ©f an action, have 

 in time become abbreviated and, to some extent, conventionalized among 

 members of the same tribe and its immediate neighbors, and have not be- 

 come common to them with other tribes simply because the form of abbre- 

 viation has been peculiar. In other cases, with the same conception and 

 attempted characterization, another yet equally appropriate delineation has 

 been selected, and when both of the differing delineations have been abbre- 



