4 AID TO DECIPHER PICTOGRAPHS. 



intellectual ideas, founded on analogies, are common all over the world as 

 well as among deaf-mutes. Concepts of the intangible and invisible are 

 only learned through percepts of tangible and visible objects, whether 

 finally expressed to the eye or to the ear, in terms of sight or of sound. 



It will be admitted that the elements of the sign-language are truly 

 natural and universal, by recurring to which the less natural signs adopted 

 dialectically or for expedition can, with perhaps some circumlocution, be 

 explained. This power of interpreting itself is a peculiar advantage, for 

 spoken languages, unless explained by gestures or indications, can only be 

 interpreted by means of some other spoken language. There is another 

 characteristic of the gesture-speech that, though it cannot be resorted to in 

 the dark, nor where the attention of the person addressed has not been 

 otherwise attracted, it has the countervailing benefit of use when the voice 

 could not be employed. When highly cultivated its rapidity on familiar 

 subjects exceeds that of speech and approaches to that of thought itself. 

 This statement may be startling to those who only notice that a selected 

 spoken word may convey in an instant a meaning for which the motions of 

 even an expert in signs may require a much longer time, but it must be 

 considered that oral speech is now wholly conventional, and that with the 

 similar development of sign-language conventional expressions with hands 

 and body could be made more quickly than with the vocal organs, because 

 more organs could be worked at once. Without such supposed develop- 

 ment the habitual communication between deaf-mutes and among Indians 

 using signs is perhaps as rapid as between the ignorant class of speakers 

 upon the same subjects, and in many instances the signs would win at a 

 trial of speed. 



Apart from their practical value for use with living members of the 

 tribes, our native semiotics will surely help the archaeologist in his study 

 of native picture-writing, the sole form of aboriginal records, for it was but 

 one more step to fasten upon bark, skins, or rocks the evanescent air-pictures 

 that still in pigments or carvings preserve their skeleton outline, and in 

 their ideography approach the rudiments of a phonetic alphabet, (gesture- 

 language is, in fact, not only a picture-language, but is actual writing, 

 though dissolving and sympathetic, and neither alphabetic nor phonetic. 



