68 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
were white. And thus you gain the idea that the cow was white. 
Do you suppose he goes through this process every time he desires 
to communicate the idea of white? No; he remembers the object 
which had conveyed to your mind the idea that that cow was white, 
and the sign for this object is ever after used as an adjective, quali- 
fying the object the whiteness of which he desires to indicate. Of 
course you cannot predicate what this particular sign may be. I 
have seen children who have conveyed the idea by touching their 
teeth; others who expressed it by an undulatory downward move- 
ment of the hand, expressive of the way in which a snow-flake falls 
to the ground. 
It will thus be understood that a deaf child first commences to 
express his ideas by pantomime, and that by a process of abbrevia- 
tion pantomimic gestures come to be used in a conventional manner. 
Pantomime is no more entitled to the name of language than a 
picture is, although many ideas can be conveyed through its means. 
In proportion as it becomes more conventional and arbitrary it be- 
comes more and more worthy of the name of language. 
The Sign-Language of Our Institutions. 
Now, when the deaf children who lived with the Abbe de l’Epee 
were first brought together, each of them used a gesture-language 
he had invented for himself as a means of communicating with his 
friends at home. Thus there were as many gesture-languages as 
there were children. The only element common to these languages 
was probably the pantomime from which they had allsprung. But 
now what happened? Association and the necessity of intercom- 
munication led to the adoption of common signs. Each child pre- 
sented his gestures to his fellows, and by a process of selection those 
signs that appeared to the majority to be most fitting survived, and 
were adopted by the wltole; and the synonymous signs, which were 
not so well fitted, were either forgotten by disuse or used in a new 
meaning to express other ideas. 
I do not wonder at the interest displayed in this growth by the 
Abbe de L’Epee and his contemporaries. To my mind it was the 
most interesting and instructive spectacle that has ever been pre- 
sented to the mind of man—the gradual evolution of an organized 
language from simple pantomime. 
When, in 1817, the first school for the deaf and dumb was opened 
in America, the sign-language as used in the school of the Abbe de 
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