ly the successive steps that an artist would
have taken in drawing the picture, or rather successive pictures, to
illustrate the story. It is, however, urged that this pictorial order
natural to deaf-mutes is not natural to the congenitally blind who are
not deaf-mute, among whom it is found to be rhythmical. It is asserted
that blind persons not carefully educated usually converse in a
metrical cadence, the action usually coming first in the structure of
the sentence. The deduction is that all the senses when intact enter
into the mode of intellectual conception in proportion to their
relative sensitiveness and intensity, and hence no one mode of
ideation can be insisted on as normal to the exclusion of others.

Whether or not the above statement concerning the blind is true, the
conceptions and presentations of deaf-mutes and of Indians using sign
language because they cannot communicate by speech, are confined to
optic and, therefore, to pictorial arrangement.

The abbe Sicard, dissatisfied with the want of tenses and
conjunctions, indeed of most of the modern parts of speech, in the
natural signs, and with their inverted order, attempted to construct a
new language of signs, in which the words should be given in the
order of the French or other spoken language adopted, which of course
required him to supply a sign for every word of spoken language.
Signs, whatever their character, could not become associated with
words, or suggest them, until words had been learned. The first step,
therefore, was to explain by means of natural signs, as distinct from
the new signs styled methodical, the meaning of a passage of verbal
language. Then each word was taken separately and a sign affixed to
it, which was to be learned by the pupil. If the word represented a
physical object, the sign would be the same as the natural sign, and
would be already understood, provided the object had been seen and was
familiar; and in all cases the endeavor was to have the sign convey
as strong a suggestion of the meaning of the word as was possible. The
final step was to gesticulate these signs, thus associated with words,
in the exact order in which the words were to stand in a sentence.
Then the pupil would write the very words desired in the exact order
desired. If the previous explanation in natural signs had not been
sufficiently full and careful, he would not understand the passage.
The methodical signs did not profess to give him the ide