54 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 



master their disgust at his ways. He talked an ugly language, 

 they said ; when he wanted to show that something was black, 

 he pointed to his dirty nails. 



The best evidence of the unity of the gesture-language is 

 the ease and certainty with which any savage from any country 

 can understand and be understood in a deaf-and-dumb school. 

 A native of Hawaii is taken to an American Institution, and 

 begins at once to talk in signs with the children, and to tell 

 about his voyage and the country he came from. A Chinese, 

 who had fallen into a state of melancholy from long want of 

 society, is quite revived by beiag taken to the same place, 

 where he can talk in gestures to his heart's content. A deaf- 

 and-dumb lad named Collins is taken to see some Laplanders, 

 who were carried about to be exhibited, and writes thus to 

 his fellow-pupils about the Lapland woman : — " Mr. Joseph 

 Humphreys told me to speak to her by signs, and she under- 

 stood me. When Cunningham was with me, asking Lapland 

 woman, and she frowned at him and me. She did not know 

 we were deaf-and-dumb^ but afterwards she knew that we 

 were deaf-and-dumb, then she spoke to us about reindeers and 

 elks and smiled at us much."^ 



The study of the gesture-language is not only useful as 

 giving us some insight into the workings of the human mind. 

 We can only judge what other men's minds are like by ob- 

 serving their outward manifestations, and similarity in the 

 most direct and simple kind of utterance is good evidence of 

 similarity in the mental processes which it communicates to 

 the outer world. As, then, the gesture-language appears not 

 to be specifically afiected by difierences in the race or climate 

 of those who use it, the shape of their skulls and the colour of 

 their skins, its evidencCj so far as it goes, bears against the 

 supposition that specific difierences are traceable among the 

 various races of man, at least in the more elementary processes 

 of the mind. 



' Dr. Orpen, ' The Contrast,' p. 1^7. 



