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Show CONCLUSION PRESENTED. 37 breast, and the right forefinger, representing the prisoner, is placed upright within the curve and passed from one side to another, in order to show that it is not permitted to pass out. { Long.) Soft is ingeniously expressed by first striking the open left hand several times with the back of the right, and then striking with the right the back of the left, restoring the supposed yielding substance to its former shape. Without further multiplying examples, the conclusion is presented that the gesture- signs among our Indians show no uniformity in detail, the variety in expression among them and in their comparison with those of deaf- mutes and transatlantic mimes being in itself of psychological interest. The generalization of TYLOR that " gesture- language is substantially the same among savage tribes all over the world " must be understood, indeed would be so understood from his remarks in another connection/ as referring to their common use of signs and of signs formed on the same principles, but not of the same signs to express the same ideas, even " substantially," Jiowever indefinitely that dubious adverb may be used. GESTURE SPEECH UNIVERSAL AS AN ART. The attempt to convey meaning by signs is, however, universal among the Indians of the plains, and those still comparatively unchanged by civilization, as is its successful execution as an art, which, however it may have commenced as an instinctive mental process, has been cultivated, and consists in actually pointing out objects in sight not only for designation, but for application and predication, and in suggesting others to the mind by action and the airy forms produced by action. In no other part of the thoroughly explored world has there been spread over so vast a space so small a number of individuals divided by so many linguistic and dialectic boundaries as in North America. Many wholly distinct tongues have for a long indefinite time been confined to a few scores of speakers, verbally incomprehensible to all others on the face of the earth who did not, from some rarely operating motive, laboriously acquire their language. Even when the American race, so styled, flourished in the greatest population of which we have any evidence ( at least accord- |
