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Show 14 PBOOESS SAME AS AMONG DEAF- MUTES. many of them became forgotten and were reinvented. Their prevalence and permanence were determined by the experience of their utility, and it would be highly interesting to ascertain how long a time was required for a distinctly new conception or execution to gain currency, become " the* fashion," so to speak, over a large part of the continent, and to be supplanted by a new " mode." The process is precisely the same as among the deaf- mutes. One of those, living among his speaking relatives, may invent signs which the latter are taught to understand, though strangers sometimes will not, because they may be by no means the fittest expressions. Should a dozen or more deaf- mutes, possessed only of such crude signs, come together, they will be able at first to communicate only on a few common subjects, but the number of those and the general scope of expression will be continually enlarged. They will also resort to the invention of new signs for new ideas as they arise, which will be made intelligible, if necessary, through the illustration and definition given by signs formally adopted, so that the fittest signs will be evolved, after mutual trial, and will survive. A multiplication of the numbers confined together, either of deaf- mutes or of Indians whose speech is diverse, will not decrease the resulting uniformity, though it will increase both the copiousness and the precision of the vocabulary. The only one of the correspondents of the present winter who remains demonstratively unconvinced of the diversities in Indian sign- language, perhaps became prejudiced when in charge of a reservation where Arap-ahos, Cheyennes, and Sioux had for a considerable time been kept secluded, so far as could be done by governmental power, from the outer world, and where naturally their signs were modified so as to become common property. Sometimes signs, doubtless once air- pictures of the most striking outline of an object, or of the most characteristic features of an action, have in time become abbreviated and, to some extent, conventionalized among members of the same tribe and its immediate neighbors, and have not become common to them with other tribes simply because the form of abbreviation has been peculiar. In other cases, with the same conception and attempted characterization, another yet equally appropriate delineation has been selected, and when both of the differing delineations have been abbre- |