Note 1867 — Chapter VI · (continued 3)

The interlinking method of communication between tribes of different languages is what is called sign or gesture language, and the study of it shows that in much the same forms it is spread over the continent. It has been specially studied by Col. Garrick Mallery. Cf. his papers in the Amer. Antiquarian, ii. 218; Proc. Amer. Asso. Adv. Science, Saratoga meeting, 1880; and at length in the First Annual Rept. Bur. of Ethnology (1881). He notes his sources of information on pp. 395, 401. He had earlier printed under the Bureau’s sanction his Introduction to the Study of Sign Language (Washington, 1880). The subject is again considered in the Third Rept. of the Bureau, p. xxvi. Cf. also W. P. Clark’s Indian Sign-language, with Explanatory Notes (Philad., 1885). Morgan (Systems of Consanguinity, 227) expresses the opinion that it has the germinal principle “from which came, first, the pictographs of the northern Indians and of the Aztecs; and, secondly, as its ultimate development, the ideographic and possibly the hieroglyphic language of the Palenqué and Copan monuments.”