SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY 
ANTHROPOLOGY. 
Shell-Mounds in Japan . — Professor E. S. Morse has communicated to the 
Boston Society of Natural History an account of an ancient shell-mound 
discovered by him at Omori, near Tokio, in Japan. In general the deposit 
resembled those described by Steenstrup, in Denmark. The implements 
found in it were mostly of horn ; only three rude stone implements were 
discovered. The pottery showed a remarkable variety of ornamentation, 
though it was very rude in character. In the incised character of the mark- 
ings it recalls the pottery of the east coast of the United States ; whilst in 
the raised knobs for handles, on the edge of the vessels, it shows the closest 
resemblance to pottery discovered by Professor Hartt, in Brazil. Professor 
Morse was uncertain whether these are traces of early Ainos, or of a race 
which preceded the Ainos and was displaced by them during their occupation 
of the island from the north. — Silliman’s Journal, February, 1878. 
The Language of Deaf Mutes . — At the meeting of the Anthropological 
Institute on March 12, Professor A. Graham Bell read a paper “ On the 
Natural Language of the Deaf and Dumb.” He regarded dumbness as, in 
most instances, a consequence of deafness, arising not from any defect in the 
vocal organs, but from an inability to acquire articulate language due to the 
want of the means of imitating it. He said that the dogma “ without speech, 
no reason,” was well founded, for deaf-mute children think in pictures, from 
which they form a language of signs, which, as contractions of it become 
understood, develops into a conventional language, but this is always very 
limited. No deaf-mute has been found who had formed the idea of a 
Supreme Being. About the commencement of the present century the Abbe 
de l’Epee established an institution for the education of deaf-mutes, and the 
tendency of the instructions there given was to render, the language more 
and more conventional by means of contractions. The result of systematic 
education has been to enable the deaf-mutes to form a community among 
themselves, employing a real language capable of representing abstract ideas 
as well as objects, and even possessing peculiar idioms of its own — for ex- 
ample, the objective case is placed first, thus : “ the boots made the boot- 
maker.” This is a difficulty, and perhaps due to a mistake in the education, 
but it furnishes an interesting subject for anthropological inquiry into the 
analogy with the development of spoken language. The North American 
Indians have a sign language, but less developed than that of the deaf- 
mutes. The language of the deaf-mutes is beginning to split into dialects. 
