Researches into the Early History of Mankind (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): And the Development of Civilization

RESEARCHES INTO THE EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND

And the Development of Civilization

EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Barnes & Noble, Inc.

122 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10011

ISBN: 978-1-4114-4866-7

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER II

THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE

CHAPTER III

THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE—(continued)

CHAPTER IV

GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE

CHAPTER V

PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING

CHAPTER VI

IMAGES AND NAMES

CHAPTER VII

GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE

CHAPTER VIII

THE STONE AGE—PAST AND PRESENT

CHAPTER IX

FIRE, COOKING, AND VESSELS

CHAPTER X

SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS

CHAPTER XI

HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION

CHAPTER XII

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF MYTHS

CHAPTER XIII

CONCLUDING REMARKS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

IN studying the phenomena of knowledge and art, religion and mythology, law and custom, and the rest of the complex whole which we call Civilization, it is not enough to have in view the more advanced races, and to know their history so far as direct records have preserved it for us. The explanation of the state of things in which we live has often to be sought in the condition of rude and early tribes; and without a knowledge of this to guide us, we may miss the meaning even of familiar thoughts and practices. To take a trivial instance, the statement is true enough as it stands, that the women of modern Europe mutilate their ears to hang jewels in them, but the reason of their doing so is not to be fully found in the circumstances among which we are living now. The student who takes a wider view thinks of the rings and bones and feathers thrust through the cartilage of the nose; the weights that pull the slit ears in long nooses to the shoulder; the ivory studs let in at the corners of the mouth; the wooden plugs as big as table-spoons put through slits in the under lip; the teeth of animals stuck point outwards through holes in the cheeks; all familiar things among the lower races up and down in the world. The modern earring of the higher nations stands not as a product of our own times, but as a relic of a ruder mental condition, one of the many cases in which the result of progress has been not positive in adding something new, but negative in taking away something belonging to an earlier state of things.

It is indeed hardly too much to say that Civilization, being a process of long and complex growth, can only be thoroughly understood when studied through its entire range; that the past is continually needed to explain the present, and the whole to explain the part. A feeling of this may account in some measure for the eager curiosity which is felt for descriptions of the life and habits of strange and ancient races, in Cook's Voyages, Catlin's 'North American Indians,' Prescott's 'Mexico' and 'Peru,' even in the meagre details which antiquaries have succeeded in recovering of the lives of the Lake-dwellers of Switzerland and the Reindeer Tribes of Central France. For matters of practical life these people may be nothing to us; but in reading of them we are consciously or unconsciously completing the picture, and tracing out the course of life, of what has been so well said to be, after all, our most interesting object of study, mankind.

Though, however, the Early History of Man is felt to be an attractive subject, and great masses of the materials needed for working it out have long been forthcoming, they have as yet been turned to but little account. The opinion that the use of facts is to illustrate theories, the confusion between History and Mythology, which is only now being partly cleared up, an undue confidence in the statements of ancient writers, whose means of information about times and places remote from themselves were often much narrower than those which are, ages later, at our own command, have been among the hindrances to the growth of sound knowledge in this direction. The time for writing a systematic treatise on the subject does not seem yet to have come; certainly nothing of the kind is attempted in the present series of essays, whose contents, somewhat miscellaneous as they are, scarcely come into contact with great part of the most important problems involved, such as the relation of the bodily characters of the various races, the question of their origin and descent, the development of morals, religion, law, and many others. The matters discussed have been chosen, not so much for their absolute importance, as because, while they are among the easiest and most inviting parts of the subject, it is possible so to work them as to bring into view certain general lines of argument, which apply not only to them, but also to the more complex and difficult problems involved in a complete treatise on the History of Civilization. These lines of argument, and their relation to the different essays, may be briefly stated at the outset.

In the first place, when a general law can be inferred from a group of facts, the use of detailed history is very much superseded. When we see a magnet attract a piece of iron, having come by experience to the general law that magnets attract iron, we do not take the trouble to go into the history of the particular magnet in question. To some extent this direct reference to general laws may be made in the study of Civilization. The four next chapters of the present book treat of the various ways in which man utters his thoughts, in Gestures, Words, Pictures, and Writing. Here, though Speech and Writing must be investigated historically, depending as they do in so great measure on the words and characters which were current in the world thousands of years ago, on the other hand the Gesture-Language and Picture-Writing may be mostly explained without the aid of history, as direct products of the human mind. In the following chapter on Images and Names, an attempt is made to refer a great part of the beliefs and practices included under the general name of magic, to one very simple mental law, as resulting from a condition of mind which we of the more advanced races have almost outgrown, and in doing so have undergone one of the most notable changes which we can trace as having happened to mankind. And lastly, a particular habit of mind accounts for a class of stories which are here grouped together as Myths of Observation, as distinguished from the tales which make up the great bulk of the folk-lore of the world, many of which latter are now being shown by the new school of Comparative Mythologists in Germany and England to have come into existence also by virtue of a general law, but a very different one.

But it is only in particular parts of Human Culture, where the facts have not, so to speak, travelled far from their causes, that this direct method is practicable. Most of its phenomena have grown into shape out of such a complication of events, that the laborious piecing together of their previous history is the only safe way of studying them. It is easy to see how far a theologian or a lawyer would go wrong who should throw history aside, and attempt to explain, on abstract principles, the existence of the Protestant Church or the Code Napoléon. A Romanesque or an Early English cathedral is not to be studied as though all that the architect had to do was to take stone and mortar and set up a building for a given purpose. The development of the architecture of Greece, its passage into the architecture of Rome, the growth of Christian ceremony and symbolism, are only part of the elements which went to form the state of things in which the genius of the builder had to work out the requirements of the moment. The late Mr. Buckle did good service in urging students to look through the details of history to the great laws of Human Development which lie behind; but his attempt to explain, by a few rash generalizations, the complex phases of European history, is a warning of the danger of too hasty an appeal to first principles.

As, however, the earlier civilization lies very much out of the beaten track of history, the place of direct records has to be supplied in great measure by indirect evidence, such as Antiquities, Language, and Mythology. This makes it generally difficult to get a sound historical basis to work on, but there happens to be a quantity of material easily obtainable, which bears on the development of some of the more common and useful arts. Thus in the eighth and ninth chapters, the transition from implements of stone to those of metal is demonstrated to have taken place in almost every district of the habitable globe, and a progress from ruder to more perfect modes of making fire and boiling food is traced in many different countries; while in the seventh, evidence is collected on the important problem of the relation which Progress has borne to Decline in art and knowledge in the history of the world.

In the remote times and places where direct history is at fault, the study of Civilization, Culture-History as it is conveniently called in Germany, becomes itself an important aid to the historian, as a means of re-constructing the lost records of early or barbarous times. But its use as contributing to the early history of mankind depends mainly on the answering of the following question, which runs through all the present essays, and binds them together as various cases of a single problem.

When similar arts, customs, beliefs, or legends are found in several distant regions, among peoples not known to be of the same stock, how is this similarity to be accounted for? Sometimes it may be ascribed to the like working of men's minds under like conditions, and sometimes it is a proof of blood relationship or of intercourse, direct or indirect, between the races among whom it is found. In the one case it has no historical value whatever, while in the other it has this value in a high degree, and the ever-recurring problem is how to distinguish between the two. An example on each side may serve to bring the matter into a clearer light.

The general prevalence of a belief in the continuance of the soul's existence after death, does not prove that all mankind have inherited such a belief from a common source. It may have been so, but the historical argument is made valueless by the fact that certain natural phenomena may have suggested to the mind of man, while in a certain stage of development, the idea of a future state, and this not once only, but again and again in different regions and at different times. These phenomena may prove nothing of the kind to us, but that is not the question. The reasoning of the savage is not to be judged by the rules which belong to a higher education; and what the ethnologist requires in such a case, is not to know what the facts prove to his own mind, but what inference the very differently trained mind of the savage may draw from them.

The belief that man has a soul capable of existing apart from the body it belongs to, and continuing to live, for a time at least, after the body is dead and buried, fits perfectly in such a mind with the fact that the shadowy forms of men and women do appear to others, when the men and women themselves are at a distance, and after they are dead. We call these apparitions dreams or phantasms, according as the person to whom they appear is asleep or awake, and when we hear of their occurrence in ordinary life, set them down as subjective processes of the mind. We do not think that the phantom of the dark Brazilian who used to haunt Spinoza was a real person; that the head which stood before a late distinguished English peer, whenever he was out of health, was a material object; that the fiends which torment the victim of delirium tremens, are what and where they seem to him to be; that any real occurrence corresponds to the dreams of the old men who tell us they were flogged last night at school. It is only a part of mankind, however, who thus disconnect dreams and visions from the objects whose forms they bear. Among the less civilized races, the separation of subjective and objective impressions, which in this, as in several other matters, makes the most important difference between the educated man and the savage, is much less fully carried out. This is indeed true to some extent among the higher nations, for no Greenlander or Kaffir ever mixed up his subjectivity with the evidence of his senses into a more hopeless confusion than the modern spiritualist. As the subject is only brought forward here as an illustration, it is not necessary to go at length into its details. A few picked examples will bring into view the two great theories of dreams and visions, current among the lower races. One is, that when a man is asleep or seeing visions, the figures which appear to him come from their places and stand over against him; the other, that the soul of the dreamer or seer goes out on its travels, and comes home with a remembrance of what it has seen.

The Australians, says Sir George Grey, believe that the nightmare is caused by an evil spirit. To get rid of it they jump up, catch a lighted brand from the fire, and with various muttered imprecations fling it in the direction where they think the spirit is. He simply came for a light, and having got it, he will go away.¹ Others tell of the demon Koin, a creature who has the appearance of a native, and like them is painted with pipe-clay and carries a fire-stick. He comes sometimes when they are asleep and carries a man off as an eagle does his prey. The shout of the victim's companions makes the demon let him drop, or else he carries him off to his fire in the bush. The unfortunate black tries to cry out, but feels himself all but choked and cannot. At daylight Koin disappears, and the native finds himself brought safely back to his own fireside.² Even in Europe, such expressions as being ridden by a hag, or by the devil, preserve the recollection of a similar train of thought. In the evil demons who trouble people in their sleep, the Incubi and Succubi, the belief in this material and personal character of the figures seen in dreams comes strongly out, perhaps nowhere more strikingly than among the natives of the Tonga Islands.³ Whoso seeth me in his sleep, said Mohammed, seeth me truly, for Satan cannot assume the similitude of my form.

Mr. St. John says that the Dayaks regard dreams as actual occurrences. They think that in sleep the soul sometimes remains in the body, and sometimes leaves it and travels far away, and that both when in and out of the body it sees and hears and talks, and altogether has a prescience given to it, which, when the body is in its natural state, it does not enjoy. Fainting fits, or a state of coma, are thought to be caused by the departure or absence of the soul on some distant expedition of its own. When a European dreams of his distant country, the Dayaks think his soul has annihilated space, and paid a flying visit to Europe during the night.⁴ Very many tribes believe in this way that dreams are incidents which happen to the spirit in its wanderings from the body, and the idea has even expressed itself in a superstitious objection to waking a sleeper, for fear of disturbing his body while his soul is out.⁵ Father Charlevoix found both the theories in question current among the Indians of North America. A dream might either be a visit from the soul of the object dreamt of, or it might be one of the souls of the dreamer going about the world, while the other—for every man has two—stayed behind with the body. Dreams, they think, are of supernatural origin, and it is a religious duty to attend to them. That the white men should look upon a dream as a matter of no consequence is a thing they cannot understand.⁶

How like a dream is to the popular notion of a soul, a shade, a spirit, or a ghost, need not be said. But there are facts which bring the dream and the ghost into yet closer connection than follows from mere resemblance. Thus the belief is found among the Finnish races that the spirits of the dead can plague the living in their sleep, and bring sickness and harm upon them.⁷ Herodotus relates that the Nasamones practise divination in the following manner:—they resort to the tombs of their ancestors, and after offering prayers, go to sleep by them, and whatever dream appears to them they take for their answer.⁸ In modern Africa, the missionary Casalis says of the Basuto, Persons who are pursued in their sleep by the image of a deceased relation, are often known to sacrifice a victim on the tomb of the defunct, in order, as they say, to calm his disquietude.⁹ Clearly, then, a man who thinks he sees in sleep the apparitions of his dead relatives and friends has a reason for believing that their spirits outlive their bodies, and this reason lies in no far-fetched induction, but in what seems to be the plain evidence of his senses. I have set the argument down as belonging especially to the lower stages of mental development, though indeed I have been startled by hearing it myself urged in sober earnest very far outside the range of savage life.

It is interesting to read how Lucretius, reasoning against the belief in a future life, takes notice of the argument from dreams as telling against him, and states, in opposition to it, the doctrine that not dreams only, but even ordinary appearances and imaginations, are caused by film-like images which fly off from the surfaces of real objects, and come in contact with our minds and senses,—

"Touching these matters, let me now explain,

How there are so-called images of things

Which, like films torn from bodies' outmost face

Hither and thither flutter through the air;

These scare us, meeting us in waking hours,

And in our dreams, when oftentimes we see

Marvellous shapes, and phantoms of the dead

Which oft have roused us horror-struck from sleep;

Lest we should judge perchance that souls escape

From Acheron, shades flit 'mid living men,

Or aught of us can after death endure."¹⁰

Never, perhaps, has the train of thought which the Epicurean poet so ingeniously combats been more clearly drawn out than in Madge Wildfire's rambling talk of her dead baby, Whiles I think my puir bairn's dead—ye ken very weel it's buried—but that signifies naething. I have had it on my knee a hundred times, and a hundred till that, since it was buried—and how could that be were it dead, ye ken—it's merely impossible.

It appears then, from these considerations, that when we find dim notions of a future state current in the remotest regions of the world, we must not thence assume that they were all diffused from a single geographical centre. The case is one in which any one plausible explanation from natural causes is sufficient to bar the argument from historical connexion. On the other hand, there is nothing to hinder such an argument in the following case, which is taken as showing the opposite side of the problem.

The great class of stories known as Beast Fables have of late risen much in public estimation. In old times they were listened to by high and low with the keenest enjoyment for their own sake. Then they were wrested from their proper nature into means of teaching little moral lessons, and at last it came to be the most contemptuous thing that could be said of a silly, pointless tale, to call it a cock and bull story. In our own day, however, a generation among whom there has sprung up a new knowledge of old times, and with it a new sympathy with old thoughts and feelings, not only appreciate the beast fables for themselves, but find in their diffusion over the world an important aid to early history. Thus Dr. Dasent has pointed out that popular stories found in the west and south of Africa must have come from the same source with old myths current in distant regions of Europe.¹¹ Still later, Dr. Bleek has published a collection of Hottentot Fables,¹² which shows that other mythic episodes, long familiar in remote countries, have found their way among these rude people, and established themselves as household tales.

A Dutchman found a Snake, who was lying under a great stone, and could not get away. He lifted up the stone, and set her free, but when he had done it she wanted to eat him. The Man objected to this, and appealed to the Hare and the Hyena, but both said it was right. Then they asked the Jackal, but he would not even believe the thing could have happened, unless he saw it with his two eyes. So the Snake lay down, and the Man put the stone upon her, just to show how it was. Now let her lie there, said the Jackal. This is only a version of the story of the Ungrateful Crocodile, which the sage Dûbân in the Arabian Nights declined to tell the king while the executioner was standing ready to cut his head off. It is given by Mr. Lane in his Notes,¹³ and I am not sure that the simpler Hottentot version is not the neater of the two. Again, the name of Reynard in South Africa, given by Dr. Bleek to his Hottentot tales, is amply justified by their containing familiar episodes belonging to the mediæval Reynard the Fox.¹⁴ The Jackal shams death and lies in the road till the fish-waggon comes by, and the waggoner throws him in to make a kaross of his skin, but the cunning beast throws a lot of fish out into the road, and then jumps out himself. In another place, the Lion is sick, and all the beasts go to see him but the Jackal. His enemy the Hyena fetches him to give his advice, so he comes before the Lion, and says he has been to ask the witch what was to be done for his sick uncle, and the remedy is for the Lion to pull the Hyena's skin off over his ears, and put it on himself while it is warm. Again, the trick by which Chanticleer gets his head out of Reynard's mouth by making him answer the farmer, reminds one of the way in which, in the Hottentot tale, the Cock makes the Jackal say his prayers, and when the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts his eyes, flies off and makes his escape. Of course these tales, though adapted to native circumstances and with very clever native turns, may be all of very recent introduction. Such a story as that which introduces a fish-waggon, would be naturally referred to the Dutch boers, from whom indeed all the Reynard stories are likely to have come. One curious passage tends to show that the stories are taken, not from the ancient versions of Reynard, but from some interpolated modern rendering. A proof that Jacob Grimm brings forward of the independent, secluded course of the old German Beast-Saga, is, that it did not take up into itself stories long current elsewhere, which would have fitted admirably into it,—thus, for instance, Æsop's story of the Fox who will not go into the Lion's den because he only sees the footsteps going in, but none coming out, is nowhere to be found in the mediæval Reynard. But we find in the Hottentot tales that this very episode has found its way in, and exactly into its fitting place. The Lion, it is said, was ill, and they all went to see him in his suffering. But the Jackal did not go, because the traces of the people who went to see him did not turn back.

As it happens, we know from other sources enough to explain the appearance in South Africa of stories from Reynard and the Arabian Nights by referring them to European or Moslem influence. But even without such knowledge, the tales themselves prove an historical connexion, near or remote, between Europe, Egypt, and South Africa. To try to make such evidence stand alone is a more ambitious task. In a chapter on the Geographical Distribution of Myths, I have compared a series of stories collected on the American Continent with their analogues elsewhere, endeavouring thereby to show an historical connexion between the mythology of America and that of the rest of the world, but with what success the reader must decide. In another chapter, some remarkable customs, which are found spread over distant tracts of country, are examined in order to ascertain, if possible, whether any historical argument may be grounded upon them.

For the errors which no doubt abound in the present essays, and for the superficial working of a great subject, a word may be said in apology. In discussing questions in which sometimes the leading facts have never before been even roughly grouped, it is very difficult not only to reject the wrong evidence, but to reproduce the right with accuracy, and the way in which new information comes in, which quite alters the face of the old, does not tend to promote over-confidence in first results. For instance, after having followed other observers in setting down as peculiar to the South Sea Islands, in or near the Samoan group, an ingenious little drilling instrument which will be hereafter described, I found it kept in stock in the London tool shops; mistakes of this kind must be frequent till our knowledge of the lower civilization is much more thoroughly collected and sifted. More accuracy might indeed be obtained by keeping to a very small number of subjects, but our accounts of the culture of the lower races, being mostly unclassified, have to be gone through as a whole, and up to a certain point it is a question whether the student of a very limited field might not lose more in largeness of view than he gained by concentration. Whatever be the fate of my arguments, any one who collects and groups a mass of evidence, and makes an attempt to turn it to account which may lead to something better, has, I think, a claim to be exempt from any very harsh criticism of mistakes and omissions. As the Knight says in the beginning of his Tale:—

"I have, God wot, a largë feeld to ere;

And waykë ben the oxen in my plough."

[Note to 2nd Edition, 1870. In renewing some special acknowledgments made in 1865 as to the composition of the present work, I cannot pass with a simple expression of obligation the name of the late Henry Christy. For the ten years during which I enjoyed his friendship, he gave me the benefit of his wide and minute knowledge, and I was able to follow all the details of his ethnological researches. He died in May 1865, while carrying on investigations in the ossiferous caverns of Central France with Prof. Edouard Lartet. The Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ, an elaborate account of these explorations, is the principal literary work bearing the name of Henry Christy. But his place in the history of Ethnology will be marked by the magnificent collection which he bequeathed to the nation, and which, belonging to the British Museum, but still kept at his residence, 103, Victoria Street, Westminster, under the name of the Christy Collection, has been developed into one of the most perfect Ethnological Museums in Europe.

I am indebted to Dr. W. R. Scott, Director of the Deaf and Dumb Institution at Exeter, for much of the assistance which has enabled me to write about the Gesture-Language with something of the confidence of an expert; and I have to thank Prof. Pott, of Halle, and Prof. Lazarus, of Berlin, for personal help in several difficult questions. Among books, I have drawn largely from the philological works of Prof. Steinthal, of Berlin, and from the invaluable collection of facts bearing on the history of civilization in the Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit, and Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft, of the late Dr. Gustav Klemm, of Dresden.]

CHAPTER II

THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE

THE power which man possesses of uttering his thoughts is one of the most essential elements of his civilization. Whether he can even think at all without some means of outward expression is a metaphysical question which need not he discussed here. Thus much will hardly be denied by any one, that man's power of utterance, so far exceeding any that the lower animals possess, is one of the principal causes of his immense preeminence over them.

Of the means which man has of uttering or expressing that which is in his mind, speech is by far the most important, so much so, that when we speak of uttering our thoughts, the phrase is understood to mean expressing them in words. But when we say that man's power of utterance is one of the great differences between him and the lower animals, we must attach to the word utterance a sense more fully conformable to its etymology. As Steinthal admits, the deaf-and-dumb man is the living refutation of the proposition, that man cannot think without speech, unless we allow the understood notion of speech as the utterance of thought by articulate sounds to be too narrow.¹⁵ To utter a thought is literally to put it outside us, as to express is to squeeze it out. Grossly material as these metaphors are, they are the best terms we have for that wonderful process by which a man, by some bodily action, can not only make other men's minds reproduce more or less exactly the workings of his own, but can even receive back from the outward sign an impression similar to theirs, as though not he himself but some one else had made it.

Besides articulate speech, the principal means by which man can express what is in his mind are the Gesture-Language, Picture-Writing, and Word-Writing. If we knew now, what we hope to know some day, how Language sprang up and grew in the world, our knowledge of man's earliest condition and history would stand on a very different basis from what it now does. But we know so little about the Origin of Language, that even the greatest philologists are forced either to avoid the subject altogether, or to turn themselves into metaphysicians in order to discuss it. The Gesture-Language and Picture-Writing, however, insignificant as they are in practice in comparison with Speech and Phonetic Writing, have this great claim to consideration, that we can really understand them as thoroughly as perhaps we can understand anything, and by studying them we can realize to ourselves in some measure a condition of the human mind which underlies anything which has as yet been traced in even the lowest dialect of Language if taken as a whole. Though, with the exception of words in which we can trace the effects either of direct emotion, as in interjections, or of imitative formation, as in peewit and cuckoo, we cannot at present tell by what steps man came to express himself by words, we can at least see how he still does come to express himself by signs and pictures, and so get some idea of the nature of this great movement, which no lower animal is known to have made or shown the least sign of making. The idea that the Gesture-Language represents a distinct separate stage of human utterance, through which man passed before he came to speak, has no support from facts. But it may be plausibly maintained, that in early stages of the development of language, while as yet the vocabulary was very rude and scanty, gesture had an importance as an element of expression, which in conditions of highly organized language it has lost.

The Gesture-Language, or Language of Signs, is in great part a system of representing objects and ideas by a rude outline-gesture, imitating their most striking features. It is, as has been well said by a deaf-and-dumb man, a picture-language. Here at once its essential difference from speech becomes evident. Why the words stand and go mean what they do is a question to which we cannot as yet give the shadow of an answer, and if we had been taught to say stand where we now say go, and go where we now say stand, it would be practically all the same to us. No doubt there was a sufficient reason for these words receiving the meanings they now bear, as indeed there is a sufficient reason for everything; but so far as we are concerned, there might as well have been none, for we have quite lost sight of the connexion between the word and the idea. But in the gesture-language the relation between idea and sign not only always exists, but is scarcely lost sight of for a moment. When a deaf-and-dumb child holds his two first fingers forked like a pair of legs, and makes them stand and walk upon the table, we want no teaching to show us what this means, nor why it is done.

This definition of the gesture-language is, however, not complete. Such objects as are actually in the presence of the speaker, or may be supposed so, are brought bodily into the conversation by touching, pointing, or looking towards them, either to indicate the objects themselves or one of their characteristics. Thus if a deaf-and-dumb man touches his underlip with his forefinger, the context must decide whether he means to indicate the lip itself or the colour red, unless, as is sometimes done, he shows by actually taking hold of the lip with finger and thumb, that it is the lip itself, and not its quality, that he means. Under the two classes pictures in the air and things brought before the mind by actual pointing out, the whole of the sign-language may be included.

It is in Deaf-and-Dumb Institutions that the gesture-language may be most conveniently studied, and what slight practical knowledge I have of it has been got in this way in Germany and in England. In these institutions, however, there are grammatical signs used in the gesture-language which do not fairly belong to it. These are mostly signs adapted, or perhaps invented, by teachers who had the use of speech, to express ideas which do not come within the scope of the very limited natural grammar and dictionary of the deaf-and-dumb. But it is to be observed that though the deaf-and-dumb have been taught to understand these signs and use them in school, they ignore them in their ordinary talk, and will have nothing to do with them if they can help it.

By dint of instruction, deaf-mutes can be taught to communicate their thoughts, and to learn from books and men in nearly the same way as we do, though in a more limited degree. They learn to read and write, to spell out sentences with the finger-alphabet, and to understand words so spelt by others; and besides this, they can be taught to speak in articulate language, though in a hoarse and unmodulated voice, and when another speaks, to follow the motions of his lips almost as though they could hear the words uttered.

It may be remarked here, once for all, that the general public often confuses the real deaf-and-dumb language of signs, in which objects and actions are expressed by pantomimic gestures, with the deaf-and-dumb finger-alphabet, which is a mere substitute for alphabetic writing. It is not enough to say that the two things are distinct; they have nothing whatever to do with one another, and have no more resemblance than a picture has to a written description of it. Though of little scientific interest, the finger-alphabet is of great practical use. It appears to have been invented in Spain, to which country the world owes the first systematic deaf-and-dumb-teaching, by Juan Pablo Bonet, in whose work a one-handed alphabet is set forth, differing but little from that now in use in Germany, or perhaps by his predecessor, Pedro de Ponce. The two-handed or French alphabet, generally used in England, is of newer date.¹⁶

The mother-tongue (so to speak) of the deaf-and-dumb is the language of signs. The evidence of the best observers tends to prove that they are capable of developing the gesture-language out of their own minds without the aid of speaking men. Indeed, the deaf-mutes in general surpass the rest of the world in their power of using and understanding signs, and for this simple reason, that though the gesture-language is the common property of all mankind, it is seldom cultivated and developed to so high a degree by those who have the use of speech, as by those who cannot speak, and must therefore have recourse to other means of communication. The opinions of two or three practical observers may be cited to show that the gesture-language is not, like the finger-alphabet, an art learnt in the first instance from the teacher, but an independent process originating in the mind of the deaf-mute, and developing itself as his knowledge and power of reasoning expand under instruction.

Samuel Heinicke, the founder of deaf-and-dumb teaching in Germany, remarks:—He (the deaf-mute) prefers keeping to his pantomime, which is simple and short, and comes to him fluently as a mother-tongue.¹⁷ Schmalz says:—Not less comprehensible are many signs which we indeed do not use in ordinary life, but which the deaf-and-dumb child uses, having no means of communicating with others but by signs. These signs consist principally in drawing in the air the shape of objects to be suggested to the mind, indicating their character, imitating the movement of the body in an action to be described, or the use of a thing, its origin, or any other of its notable peculiarities.¹⁸ With regard to signs, says Dr. Scott, of Exeter, the (deaf-and-dumb) child will most likely have already fixed upon signs by which it names most of the objects given in the above lesson (pin, key, etc.), and which it uses in its intercourse with its friends. These signs had always better be retained (by the child's family), and if a word has not received such a sign, endeavour to get the child to fix upon one. It will do this most probably better than you.¹⁹

The Abbé Sicard, one of the first and most eminent of the men who have devoted their lives to the education and humanizing of these afflicted creatures, has much the same account to give. It is not I, he says, who am to invent these signs. I have only to set forth the theory of them under the dictation of their true inventors, those whose language consists of these signs. It is for the deaf-and-dumb to make them, and for me to tell how they are made. They must be drawn from the nature of the objects they are to represent. It is only the signs given by the mute himself to express the actions which he witnesses, and the objects which are brought before him, which can replace articulate language. Speaking of his celebrated deaf-and-dumb pupil, Massieu, he says:—Thus, by a happy exchange, as I taught him the written signs of our language, Massieu taught me the mimic signs of his. So it must be said that it is neither I nor my admirable master (the Abbé de l'Epée) who are the inventors of the deaf-and-dumb language. And as a foreigner is not fit to teach a Frenchman French, so the speaking man has no business to meddle with the invention of signs, giving them abstract values.²⁰ All these are modern statements; but long before the days of Deaf-and-Dumb Institutions, Rabelais' sharp eye had noticed how natural and appropriate were the untaught signs made by born deaf-mutes. When Panurge is going to try by divination from signs what his fortune will be in married life, Pantagruel thus counsels him:—Pourtant, vous fault choisir ung mut sourd de nature, affin que ses gestes vous soyent naifuement propheticques, non fainctz, fardez, ne affectez.

Nor are we obliged to depend upon the observations of ordinary speaking men for our knowledge of the way in which the gesture-language develops itself in the mind of the deaf-and-dumb. The educated deaf-mutes can tell us from their own experience how gesture-signs originate. The following account is given by Kruse, a deaf-mute himself, and a well-known teacher of deaf mutes, and author of several works of no small ability:—"Thus the deaf-and-dumb must have a language, without which no thought can be brought to pass. But here nature soon comes to his help. What strikes him most, or what . . . makes a distinction to him between one thing and another, such distinctive signs of objects are at once signs by which he knows these objects, and knows them again; they become tokens of things. And whilst he silently elaborates the signs he has found for single objects, that is, whilst he describes their forms for himself in the air, or imitates them in thought with hands, fingers, and gestures, he developes for himself suitable signs to represent ideas, which serve him as a means of fixing ideas of different kinds in his mind and recalling them to his memory. And thus he makes himself a language, the so-called gesture-language (Geberden-sprache); and with these few scanty and imperfect signs, a way for thought is already broken, and with his thought as it now opens out, the language cultivates and forms itself further and further."²¹

I will now give some account of the particular dialect (so to speak) of the gesture-language, which is current in the Berlin Deaf-and-Dumb Institution.²² I made a list of about 500 signs, taking them down from my teacher, Carl Wilke, who is himself deaf-and-dumb. They talk of 5000 signs being in common use there, but my list contains the most important. First, as to the signs themselves, the following, taken at random, will give an idea of the general principle on which all are formed.

To express the pronouns I, thou, he, I push my forefinger against the pit of my stomach for I; push it towards the person addressed for thou; point with my thumb over my right shoulder for he; and so on.

When I hold my right hand flat with the palm down, at the level of my waist, and raise it towards the level of my shoulder, that signifies great; but if I depress it instead, it means little.

The sign for man is the motion of taking off the hat; for woman, the closed hand is laid upon the breast; for child, the right elbow is dandled upon the left hand.

The adverb hither and the verb to come have the same sign, beckoning with the finger towards oneself.

To hold the first two fingers apart, like a letter V, and dart the finger tips out from the eyes, is to see. To touch the ear and tongue with the fore-finger, is to hear and to taste. Whatever is to be pointed out, the fore-finger, so appropriately called index, has to point out or indicate.

". . . atque ipsa videtur

Protrabere ad gestum pueros infantia linguæ

Quom facit ut digito quæ sint præsentia monstrent."²³

To speak is to move the lips as in speaking (all the deaf-and-dumb are taught to speak in articulate words in the Berlin establishment), and to move the lips thus, while pointing with the fore-finger out from the mouth, is name, or to name, as though one should define it to point out by speaking.

The outline of the shape of roof and walls done in the air with two hands is house; with a flat roof it is room. To smell as at a flower, and then with the two hands make a horizontal circle before one, is garden.

To pull up a