l scope of expression will be continually enlarged. Each one
commences with his own conception and his own presentment of it,
but the universality of the medium used makes it sooner or later
understood. This independent development, thus creating diversity,
often renders the first interchange of thought between strangers
slow, for the signs must be self-interpreting. There can be no natural
universal language which is absolute and arbitrary. When used without
convention, as sign language alone of all modes of utterance can be,
it must be tentative, experimental, and flexible. The mutes will also
resort to the invention of new signs for new ideas as they
arise, which will be made intelligible, if necessary, through the
illustration and definition given by signs formerly adopted, so that
the fittest signs will be evolved, after rivalry and trial, and will
survive. But there may not always be such a preponderance of fitness
that all but one of the rival signs shall die out, and some, being
equal in value to express the same idea or object, will continue to
be used indifferently, or as a matter of individual taste, without
confusion. A multiplication of the numbers confined together, either
of deaf-mutes or of Indians whose speech is diverse, will not decrease
the resulting uniformity, though it will increase both the copiousness
and the precision of the vocabulary. The Indian use of signs, though
maintained by linguistic diversities, is not coincident with any
linguistic boundaries. The tendency is to their uniformity among
groups of people who from any cause are brought into contact with each
other while still speaking different languages. The longer and closer
such contact, while no common tongue is adopted, the greater will be
the uniformity of signs.

Colonel Dodge takes a middle ground with regard to the identity of
the signs used by our Indians, comparing it with the dialects and
provincialisms of the English language, as spoken in England, Ireland,
Scotland, and Wales. But those dialects are the remains of actually
diverse languages, which to some speakers have not become integrated.
In England alone the provincial dialects are traceable as the legacies
of Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Danes, with a varying amount of Norman
influence. A thorough scholar in the composite tongue, now
called English, will be able to understand all the dialects and
provincialisms of English in the British Isles, but the uneducated
man of