OBITUARY NOTICES. 
469 
these interesting records. He foresaw that these customs 
would ultimately be lost and forgotten as the Indians were 
brought more and more under the control of the authorities 
and were deprived of their favorite pastimes of warlike 
enterprise and hunting. Events have already justified his 
wise foresight. Before Colonel Mallery began his researches 
it was, perhaps, generally supposed that the rude picto- 
graphs of the Indians, some of which were believed to be of 
pre-Columbian time, were unmeaning and half-childish de¬ 
vices. He was gradually convinced that gesture-speech and 
the cognate pictographs formed a complete system, involv¬ 
ing mythology and history and having an important rela¬ 
tion to spoken language. 
The Bureau of Ethnology was organized in 1874, and 
some time after the director, Major J. W. Powell, invited 
Colonel Mallery to pursue his investigations in connection 
with that institution. The first result was the publication, 
in 1880, of a pamphlet of 72 pages, with 33 figures, entitled 
“ Introduction to the Study of Sign-language among the 
North American Indians as Illustrating the Gesture-speech 
of Mankind.” This was intended rather as a manual for 
students, and in the same year followed a quarto volume of 
329 pages, “A Collection of Gesture Signs and Signals of 
the North American Indians, with some comparisons.” The 
latter work was distributed to collaborators only. In 1881 
Colonel Mallery’s second important contribution was pub¬ 
lished in the first annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 
namely, “ Sign-language among North American Indians 
Compared with that among other People and Deaf-mutes.” 
This treatise comprised 290 pages and was illustrated with 
13 plates, a map, and 285 figures. While intended by its 
author as a preliminary report only, it at once Jook high 
rank, both at home and abroad, as an authoritative exposi¬ 
tion upon an almost entirely new subject of anthropology. 
Mallery’s next publication appeared in the Fourth Annual 
Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1886 (1887), under the 
title, “ Pictographs of the North American Indians; a pre¬ 
liminary paper.” It consisted of 256 pages, illustrated with 
