Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/64

54 wanted to show that something was black, he pointed to his dirty nails.

The best evidence of the unity of the gesture-language is the ease and certainty with which any savage from any country can understand and be understood in a deaf-and-dumb school. A native of Hawaii is taken to an American Institution, and begins at once to talk in signs with the children, and to tell about his voyage and the country he came from. A Chinese, who had fallen into a state of melancholy from long want of society, is quite revived by being taken to the same place, where he can talk in gestures to his heart's content. A deaf-and-dumb lad named Collins is taken to see some Laplanders, who were carried about to be exhibited, and writes thus to his fellow-pupils about the Lapland woman:—"Mr. Joseph Humphreys told me to speak to her by signs, and she understood me. When Cunningham was with me, asking Lapland woman, and she frowned at him and me. She did not know we were deaf-and-dumb, but afterwards she knew that we were deaf-and-dumb, then she spoke to us about reindeers and elks and smiled at us much."

The study of the gesture-language is not only useful as giving us some insight into the workings of the human mind. We can only judge what other men's minds are like by observing their outward manifestations, and similarity in the most direct and simple kind of utterance is good evidence of similarity in the mental processes which it communicates to the outer world. As, then, the gesture-language appears not to be specifically affected by differences in the race or climate of those who use it, the shape of their skulls and the colour of their skins, its evidence, so far as it goes, bears against the supposition that specific differences are traceable among the various races of man, at least in the more elementary processes of the mind.