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Show IS INDIAN SIGN- LANGUAGE UNIVERSAL AND IDENTICAL! 13 whose inimitable chapters on gesture- speech in his " Researches into the Early History of Mankind" have in a great degree prompted the present inquiries, does not appear to have attracted the attention of that eminent authority. He receives the report without question, and formulates it, that " the same signs serve as a medium of converse from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico." Its truth can only be established by careful comparison of lists or vocabularies of signs taken undfer test conditions at widely different times and places. For this purpose lists have been collated by the writer, taken in different parts of the country at several dates, from the last century to the last month, comprising together more than eight hundred signs, many of them, however, being mere variants or synonyms for the same object or quality, and some being of small value from uncertainty in description or authority, or both. The result of the collation and analysis thus far made is that the alleged existence of one universal and absolute sign- language is, in its terms of general assertion, one of the many popular errors prevailing about our aborigines. In numerous instances there is an entire discrepancy between the signs made by different bodies of Indians to express the same idea; and if any of these are regarded as determinate, or even widely conventional, and used without further devices, they will fail in conveying the desired impression to any one unskilled in gesture as an art, who had not formed the same precise conception or been instructed in the arbitrary motion. Probably none of the gestures that are found in current use are, in their origin, conventional, but are only portions, more or less elaborate, of obvious natural pantomime, and those proving efficient to convey most successfully at any time the several ideas became the most widely adopted, liable, however, to be superseded by yet more appropriate conceptions and delineations. The skill of any tribe and the copiousness of its signs are proportioned to the accidental ability of the few individuals in it who act as custodians and teachers, so that the several tribes at different times vary in their degree of proficiency, and therefore both the precise mode of semi-otic expression and the amount of its general use are always fluctuating. All the signs, even those classed as innate, were at some time invented by some one person, though by others simultaneously and independently, and |