THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 15 



process by wMcli a man, by some bodily action, can not only 

 make other men's minds reproduce more or less exactly the 

 workings of his own, but can even receive back from the out- 

 ward sign an impression similar to theirs, as though not he 

 himself, but some one else, had made it. 



Besides articulate speech, the principal means by which man 

 can express what is in his mind are the Gesture-Language, 

 Picture-Writing, and Word-Wi'iting. If we knew now, what 

 we hope to know some day, how Language sprang up and grew 

 in the world, our knowledge of man's earliest condition and 

 history would stand on a very different basis from what it now 

 does. But we know so little about the Origin of Language, 

 that even the greatest philologists are forced either to avoid 

 the subject altogether, or to turn themselves into metaphysi- 

 cians in order to discuss it. The Gesture-Language and Pic- 

 ture-Writing, however, insignificant as they are in practice in 

 comparison with Speech and Phonetic Writing, have this great 

 claim to consideration, that we can really understand them as 

 thoroughly as perhaps we can understand anything, and by 

 studying them we can realize to ourselves in some measure a 

 condition of the human mind which underlies anything which 

 has as yet been traced in even the lowest dialect of Language, 

 if taken as a whole. Though, with the exception of words 

 which are evidently imitative, like " peewit " and " cuckoo," 

 we cannot at present tell by what steps man came to express 

 himself by words, we can at least see how he still does come to 

 express himself by signs and pictures, and so get some idea of 

 the nature of this great movement, which no lower animal is 

 known to have made or shown the least sign of making. There 

 is, however, no proof that man passed through any intermediate 

 stage, such as the use of gestures, before he spoke. This 

 theory, though by no means contemptible, has, so far as at pre- 

 sent appears, no sufficient support from observed facts. 



The Gesture-Language, or Language of Signs, is in great 

 part a system of representing objects and ideas by a rude out- 

 line-gesture, imitating their most striking features. It is, as 

 has been well said by a deaf..and-dumb man, '' a picture-lan- 

 guage." Here at once its essential difference from speech be- 



