shows many others identical, not only with those of the
Italians and the classic Greeks and Romans, but of other peoples of
the Old World, both savage and civilized. The generic uniformity
is obvious, while the occasion of specific varieties can be readily
understood.

COMPARISON WITH DEAF-MUTE SIGNS.

The Indians who have been shown over the civilized East have often
succeeded in holding intercourse, by means of their invention and
application of principles in what may be called the voiceless mother
utterance, with white deaf-mutes, who surely have no semiotic code
more nearly connected with that attributed to the plain-roamers
than is derived from their common humanity. They showed the greatest
pleasure in meeting deaf-mutes, precisely as travelers in a foreign
country are rejoiced to meet persons speaking their language, with
whom they can hold direct communication without the tiresome and often
suspected medium of an interpreter. When they met together they were
found to pursue the same course as that noticed at the meeting of
deaf-mutes who were either not instructed in any methodical dialect
or who had received such instruction by different methods. They often
disagreed in the signs at first presented, but soon understood them,
and finished by adopting some in mutual compromise, which proved to be
those most strikingly appropriate, graceful, and convenient; but there
still remained in some cases a plurality of fitting signs for the same
idea or object. On one of the most interesting of these occasions, at
the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, in 1873, it was
remarked that the signs of the deaf-mutes were much more readily
understood by the Indians, who were Absaroka or Crows, Arapahos, and
Cheyennes, than were theirs by the deaf-mutes, and that the latter
greatly excelled in pantomimic effect. This need not be surprising
when it is considered that what is to the Indian a mere adjunct or
accomplishment is to the deaf-mute the natural mode of utterance, and
that there is still greater freedom from the trammel of translating
words into action--instead of acting the ideas themselves--when, the
sound of words being unknown, they remain still as they originated,
but another kind of sign, even after the art of reading is acquired,
and do not become entities as with us. The "action, action, action,"
of Demosthenes is their only oratory, not the mere heightening of it,
however valuable.

On March 6, 188