GENERAL MEETING. 65 
tution for the deaf and dumb finds the pupils and teachers em- 
ploying a gesture language which he does not understand; but in 
time he comes to understand it, and learns by imitation to use it, 
just as an American child in Germany comes in time to understand 
and speak German. 
Although congenitally deaf children, when they enter an institu- 
tion, do not understard or use the sign language as there employed, 
they each know and use a gesture language of some kind, which 
they employ at home in communicating with their friends and rela- 
tives. Hence it is argued that if the “sign language” employed in 
our institutions is not the only one, a gesture language of some kind 
is necessarily the vernacular of the congenitally deaf child. The 
scope of the statement is thus widened, and the proposition we have 
now to consider may be thus expressed: Gesture language, in the 
wider sense, is the only forin of language that is natural to those 
who are congenitally deaf. 
It is a matter of great importance to the 34,000 deaf-mutes of 
this country, and to their friends and relatives, as well as to all 
persons who are interested in the amelioration of the condition of 
the deaf and dumb, that we examine this proposition with care and 
decide whether it is a fallacy or not. To my mind it is a fallacy 
based upon another concerning the nature of language itself, namely, 
that there is such a thing as a natural language. Such an idea has 
led to errors in the past, and will ever continue todoso. Wehave 
all read of the monarch of ancient times, who is recorded to have 
shut up a number of little children by themselves, and to have 
given orders to their attendants to hold no communication with 
them, so that he might observe what language they would naturally 
speak as they grew up. It is recorded that the first word uttered 
was a Greek word, from which it was argued that the Greek lan- 
guage was the natural language of mankind. 
In the seventeenth century the ingenious Van Helmont was im- 
bued with the idea that the Hebrew language was of divine origin, 
from which he argued that Hebrew was the natural language of 
mankind, and that the shapes of the Hebrew letters had some nat- 
ural relation to the sounds they represented ; that they pictured, in 
fact, the positions of the vocal organs in forming the sounds. The 
latter idea led him to employ the characters as a means of teaching 
articulation to a deaf-mute; but the former idea led him to teach 
his deaf-mute Hebrew, instead of his native tongue. 
