IS INDIAN SIGN-LANGUAGE UNIVERSAL AND IDENTICAL? 13 



whose inimitable chapters on gesture-speech in his " Researches into the 

 Early History of Mankind " have in a great degree prompted the present 

 inquiries, does not appear to have attracted the attention of that eminent 

 authority. He receives the report without question, and formulates it, that 

 " the same signs serve as a medium of converse from Hudson Bay to the 

 Gulf of Mexico." Its truth can only be established by careful comparison 

 of lists or vocabularies of signs taken under test conditions at widely dif- 

 ferent times and places. For this purpose lists have been collated by the 

 writer, taken in different parts of the country at several dates, from the last 

 century to the last month, comprising together more than eight hundred 

 signs, many of them, however, being mere variants or synonyms for the 

 same object or quality, and some being of small value from uncertainty in 

 description or authority, or both. 



The result of the collation and analysis thus far made is that the al- 

 leged existence of one universal and absolute sign-language is, in its terms 

 of general assertion, one of the many popular errors prevailing about our 

 aborigines. In numerous instances there is an entire discrepancy between 

 the signs made by different bodies of Indians to express the same idea ; 

 and if any of these are regarded as determinate, or even widely conven- 

 tional, and used Avithout further devices, they will fail in conveying the 

 desired impression to any one unskilled in gesture as an art, who had not 

 formed the same precise conception or been instructed in the arbitrary 

 motion. Probably none of the gestures that are found in current use are, 

 in their origin, conventional, but are only portions, more or less elaborate, 

 of obvious natural pantomime, and those proving efficient to convey most 

 successfully at any time the several ideas became the most widely adopted, 

 liable, however, to be superseded by yet more appropriate conceptions and 

 delineations. Tlie skill of any tribe and the copiousness of its signs are 

 proportioned to the accidental ability of the few individuals in it who act 

 as custodians and teachers, so that the several tribes at different times vary 

 in their degree of proficiency, and therefore both the precise mode of semi- 

 otic expression and the amount of its general use are always fluctuating. 

 All the signs, even those classed as innate, were at some time invented by 

 some one person, though by others simultaneously and independently, and 



