GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 75 



exercised in giving what may be called name-sounds to pei-- 

 sons wliom slie knew, and wMcli slie would make wlien the 

 persons to whom she had given them came near her, or when 

 she wanted to find them, or even when she was thinking of 

 them. She had made as many as fifty or sixty of these name- 

 sounds, some of which have been written down, as foo, too, pa, 

 fif, pig, ts, but many of them were not capable of being written 

 down even approximately. 



Even if Laura's vocal sounds are not classed as real words, 

 a distinction between the articulate sounds used by the deaf- 

 and-dumb for child, water, eating, and drinking, etc., and the 

 words of ordinary language, could not easily be made, whether 

 the deaf-mutes invented these sounds or imitated them from 

 the lips of others. To go upon the broadest ground, the mere 

 fact that teachers can take children who have no means of 

 uttering their thoughts but the gesture-language, and teach 

 them to articulate words, to recognize them by sight when 

 uttered by others, to write them, and to understand them as 

 equivalents for their own gestures, is sufiicient to bridge over 

 the gulf which lies between the gesture-language and, at least, 

 a rudimentary form of word-language. These two kinds of 

 utterance are capable of being translated with more or less 

 exactness into one another ; and it seems more likely than 

 not that there may be a similarity between the process by 

 which the human mind first uttered itself in speech, and that 

 by which the same mind still utters itself in gestures. 



To turn to another subject. We have no evidence of man 

 ever having lived in society without the use of spoken language; 

 but there are some myths of such races, and, moreover, state- 

 ments have been made by modern writers of eminence as to 

 an intermediate state between gesture-language and word- 

 language, which deserve careful examination. 



In Ethiopia, across the desert, says the geographer Pom- 

 ponius Mela, there dwell dumb people, and such as use gestures 

 instead of language ; others, whose tongues give no sound ; 

 others, who have no tongues (muti populi, et quibus pro eloquio 

 nutus est; alii sine sono linguas; ahi sine Unguis, etc.)'. Pliny 



1 Mela, iii. 9. 



