Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/88

78 happened here, as in many other accounts of savage tribes, that closer acquaintance has shown them to have been wrongly accused. Mr. Bailey, who has had good opportunities of studying them, contradicts their supposed deficiency in language with the remark, "I never knew one of them at a loss for words sufficiently intelligible to convey his meaning, not to his fellows only, but to the Singhalese of the neighbourhood, who are all, more or less, acquainted with the Veddah patois." Dr. Milligan is, I believe, our best authority as to the Tasmanians and their language, but he probably had to trust in this matter to native information, which is far from being always safe. Lastly, Captain Burton only paid a flying visit to the Western Indians, and his interpreters could hardly have given him scientific information on such a subject.

The point in question is one which it is not easy to bring to a perfectly distinct issue, seeing that all people, savage and civilised, do use signs more or less. As has been remarked already, many savage tribes accompany their talk with gestures to a great extent, and in conversation with foreigners, gestures and words are usually mixed to express what is to be said. It is extremely likely that Madame Pfeiffer's savages suffered the penalty of being set down as wanting in language, for no worse fault than using a combination of words and signs in order to make what they meant as clear as possible to her comprehension. But the existence of a language incomplete, even for ordinary purposes, without the aid of gesture-signs, could only be proved by the evidence of an educated man so familiar with the language in question, as to be able to say from absolute personal knowledge not only what it can, but what it cannot do, an amount of acquaintance to which I think none of the writers quoted would lay claim. In the case of languages spoken by very low races, like the Puris and the Tasmanians, the difficulty of deciding