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Show SURVIVAL IN CONVERSATIONAL GESTURES. 41 obtained from that tribe. Further discouragement came from an Indian agent giving the decided statement, after four years of intercourse with the Pah- Utes, that no such thing as a communication by signs was known or even remembered by them, which, however, was less difficult to bear because on the day of the receipt of that well- intentioned missive some officers of the Bureau of Ethnology were actually talking in signs with a delegation of that very tribe of Indians then in Washington, from one of whom the Story hereinafter appearing was received. The difficulty in collecting signs may arise because Indians are often provokingly reticent about their old habits and traditions; because they do not distinctly comprehend what is sought to be obtained, and because sometimes the art, abandoned in general, only remains in the memories of a few persons influenced by special circumstances or individual fancy. In this latter regard a comparison may be made with the old science of heraldry, once of practical use and a necessary part of a liberal education, of which hardly a score of persons in the United States have any but the vague knowledge that it once existed; yet the united memories of those persons could, in the absence of records, reproduce all essential points on the subject. Even when the specific practice of the sign- language has been generally discontinued for more than one generation, either from the adoption of a jargon or from the common use of the tongue of the conquering English, French, or Spanish, some of the gestures formerly employed as substitutes for words may survive as a customary accompaniment to oratory or impassioned conversation, and, when ascertained, should be carefully noted. An example, among many, may be found in the fact that the now civilized Muskoki or Creeks, as mentioned by Rev. H. F. BUCKNEB, when speaking of the height of children or women, illustrate their words by holding their hands at the proper elevation, palm up; but when describing the height of " soulless" animals or inanimate objects, they hold the palm downward. This, when correlated with the distinctive signs of other Indians, is an interesting case of the survival of a practice which, so far as yet reported, the oldest men of the tribe now living only remember to have once existed. It is probable that a collection of such distinctive gestures among even the |
