the glossarist and laboriously derived from, them by
the philologer. The use of words in formulation, still more in
terminology, is so wide a departure from primitive conditions as to
be incompatible with the only primordial language yet discovered. No
vocabulary of signs will be exhaustive for the simple reason that the
signs are exhaustless, nor will it be exact because there cannot be a
correspondence between signs and words taken individually. Not only
do words and signs both change their meaning from the context, but a
single word may express a complex idea, to be fully rendered only by
a group of signs, and, _vice versa_, a single sign may suffice for a
number of words. The elementary principles by which the combinations
in sign and in the oral languages of civilization are effected are
also discrepant. The attempt must therefore be made to collate and
compare the signs according to general ideas, conceptions, and, if
possible, the ideas and conceptions of the gesturers themselves,
instead of in order of words as usually arranged in dictionaries.

The hearty thanks of the writer are rendered to all his collaborators,
a list of whom is given below, and will in future be presented in
a manner more worthy of them. It remains to give an explanation of
the mode in which a large collection of signs has been made directly
by the officers of the Bureau of Ethnology. Fortunately for this
undertaking, the policy of the government brought to Washington during
the year 1880 delegations, sometimes quite large, of most of the
important tribes. Thus the most intelligent of the race from many
distant and far separated localities were here in considerable numbers
for weeks, and indeed, in some cases, months, and, together with
their interpreters and agents, were, by the considerate order of the
honorable Secretary of the Interior, placed at the disposal of this
Bureau for all purposes of gathering ethnologic information. The
facilities thus obtained were much greater than could have been
enjoyed by a large number of observers traveling for a long time over
the continent for the same express purpose. The observations relating
to signs were all made here by the same persons, according to a
uniform method, in which the gestures were obtained directly from the
Indians, and their meaning (often in itself clear from the context
of signs before known) was translated sometimes through the medium of
English or Spanish, or of a native langu