Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/29

Rh 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." 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