Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/25

Rh 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