ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 19 



TENTH REGULAR MEETING. 



October 21, 1879. 



The Sign Language of the North American Indians. 

 By GARRICK MALLERY. 



The design of this paper was to illustrate the gesture-speech 

 of mankind. After tracing its history, so far as known in 

 other parts of the world, the theory was controverted thafr 

 the power of the visible gesture relative to, and its influence 

 upon, the audible word was inversely proportioned to the 

 development of the oral language. The travellers' tales of 

 people unable to understand their mother-tongue in the dark 

 because of their inability to see the accompanying gestures, 

 were of doubtful truth anywhere, and certainly false as re- 

 gards the American tribes, many of those that gesture most 

 freely having a copious vocabulary with highly differentiated 

 parts of speech. The true distinction is that where the num- 

 ber of men speaking the same dialect is small, and when 

 they are thrown into contact on equal terms with others of 

 different tongues, gesture is necessarily resorted to for con- 

 verse; while large bodies enjoying a common language, and 

 either isolated from foreigners, or if in contact with them, 

 so dominant as to compel the learning and adoption of their 

 own tongue, become impassive in its delivery. Instances of 

 this from the Old World were presented. But nowhere as 

 on our continent was there spread over so vast a space so 

 small a number of individuals, divided by so many linguis- 

 tic boundaries. The general use of signs originating from 

 the necessity for exira-tribal communication became also 

 convenient for the habits of hunters and the military tac- 

 tics of surprise. So, naturally, the practice of a sign lan- 

 guage among our Indians is noticed by all travelers, and the 

 assertion has been current that it was a single universal code. 

 To test this remarkable statement a number of sign vocabu- 

 laries taken in different parts of the country and at remote 



