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Show 38 SIGN- LAIJGUAGE AS AN INDIAN ART. ing to the published views of the present writer, which seem to have been favorably received), the immense number of languages and dialects still preserved, or known by early recorded fragments to have once existed, so subdivided it that but the dwellers in a very few villages could talk together with ease, and all were interdistributed among unresponsive vernaculars, each to the other being bar- bar- ous in every meaning of the term. It is, however, noticeable that the three great families of Iroquois, Algonkin, and Muskoki, when met by their first visitors, do not appear to have often impressed the latter with their reliance upon gesture- language to the same extent as has always been reported of the aborigines now and formerly found farther inland. If this absence of report arose from the absence of the practice and not from imperfection of observation, an explanation may be suggested from the fact that among those families there were more people dwelling near together in sociological communities, of the same speech, though with dialectic peculiarities, than became known later in the later West, and not being nomadic, their intercourse with strange tribes was less individual and conversational. The use of gesture- signs, continued, if not originating, in necessity for communication with the outer world, became entribally convenient from the habits of hunters, the main occupation of all savages, depending largely upon stealthy approach to game, and from the sole form of their military tactics- to surprise an enemy. In the still expanse of virgin forests, and especially in the boundless solitudes of the great plains, a slight sound can l) D heard over a vast area, that of the human voice being from its rarity the most startling, so that it is now, as it probably has been for centuries, a common precaution for members of a hunting or war party not to speak together when on such expeditions, oommunicating exclusively by signs. The acquired habit also exhibits itself not only in formal oratory, but in impassioned or emphatic conversation. This domestic as well as foreign exercise for generations in the gesture-language has naturally produced great skill both in expression and reception, so as to bo measurably independent of any prior mutual understanding, or what in a system of signals is called preconcert. Two accomplished army signalists can, after sufficient trial, communicate without either of them learn- |