tice, such as are applied
to dancing and fencing with a similar object; indeed, accomplishment
in both dancing and fencing has been recommended as of use to
all orators. In reference to this subject a quotation from Lord
Chesterfield's letters is in place: "I knew a young man, who,
being just elected a member of Parliament, was laughed at for being
discovered, through the key-hole of his chamber door, speaking to
himself in the glass and forming his looks and gestures. I could not
join in that laugh, but, on the contrary, thought him much wiser than
those that laughed at him, for he knew the importance of those little
graces in a public assembly and they did not."

OUR INDIAN CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO SIGN LANGUAGE.

In no other thoroughly explored part of the world has there been found
spread over so large 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 an indefinitely long 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 according to the published views
of the present writer, which seem to have been generally accepted),
the immense number of languages and dialects still preserved, or known
by early recorded fragments to have once existed, so subdivided it
that only the dwellers in a very few villages could talk together with
ease. They were all interdistributed among unresponsive vernaculars,
each to the other being _bar-bar-ous_ in every meaning of the term.
The number of known stocks or families of Indian languages within the
territory of the United States amounts now to sixty-five, and these
differ among themselves as radically as each differs from the Hebrew,
Chinese, or English. In each of these linguistic families there are
several, sometimes as many as twenty, separate languages, which also
differ from each other as much as do the English, French, German, and
Persian divisions of the Aryan linguistic stock.

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 stealt