THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID esse ea quee rerum simulacra vocamus ; Quae, quasi membranse summo de corpore rerum Dereptse, volitant ultroque citroque per auras, Atque eadem nobis vigilantibus obvia mentea Terrificant atque in somnis, cum ssepe figuras Contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum, Quae nos horrifice languentis ssepe sopore Excierunt ; ne forte animas Acherunte reamur Effugere aut umbras inter vivos volitare, Neve aliquid nostri post mortem posse relinqui." 10 INTRODUCTION. diffused from a single geographical centre. The case is one in which any one plausible explanation from natural causes is sufficient to bar the argument from historical connection. On the other hand, there is nothing to hinder such an argument in the following case, which is taken as showing the opposite side of the problem. The great class of stories known as Beast Fables have of late risen much in public estimation. In old times they were lis- tened to by high and low with the keenest enjoyment for their own sake. Then they were wrested from their proper nature into means of teaching little moral lessons, and at last it came to be the most contemptuous thing that could be said of a silly, pointless tale, to call it a " cock and bull story/' In our own day, however, a generation among whom there has sprung up a new knowledge of old times, and with it a new sympathy with old thoughts and feelings, not only appreciate the beast fables for themselves, but find in their diffusion over the world an important aid to early history. Thus Dr. Dasent, in his Introduction to the Norse Tales, has shown that popular stories found in the west and south of Africa must have come from the same source with old myths current in distant regions of Europe. Still later, Dr. Bleek has published a collection of Hottentot Fables, 1 which shows that other mythic episodes, long familiar in remote countries, have established themselves among these rude people as household tales. A Dutchman found a Snake, who was lying under a great stone, and could not get away. He lifted up the stone, and set her free, but when he had done it she wanted to eat him. The Man objected to this, and appealed to the Hare and the Hyena, but both said it was right. Then they asked the Jackal, but he would not even believe the thing could have happened unless he saw it with his two eyes. So the Snake lay down, and the Man put the stone upon her, just to show how it was. " Now let her lie there," said the Jackal. This is only another version of the story of the Ungrateful Crocodile, which the sage Duban declined to tell the king while the executioner was standing ready to cut his head off. It is given by Mr. Lane in his Notes 1 Bleek, 'Reynard the Fox in South Africa;' London, 1864, pp. 11-13, 16, 19, 23. INTRODUCTION. 11 to the Arabian Nights/ and I am not sure that the simpler Hottentot version is not the neater of the two. Again, the name of Reynard in South Africa, given by Dr. Bleek to his Hottentot tales, is amply justified by their containing familiar episodes belonging to the mediaeval H Reynard the Fox." 2 The Jackal shams death and lies in the road till the fish-waggon comes by, and the waggoner throws him in to make a kaross of his skin, but the cunning beast throws a lot of fish out into the road, and then jumps out himself. In another place, the Lion is sick, and all the beasts go to see him but the Jackal. His enemy the Hyena fetches him to give his advice, so he comes before the Lion, and says he has been to ask the witch what was to be done for his sick uncle, and the remedy is for the Lion to pull the Hyena's skin off over his ears, and put it on himself while it is Warm. Again, the trick by which Chan- ticleer gets his head out of Reynard's mouth by making him answer the farmer, reminds one of the way in which, in the Hottentot tale, the Cock makes the Jackal say his prayers, and when the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts his eyes, flies off and makes his escape. Of course these tales, though adapted to native circumstances and with very clever native turns, may be all of very recent introduction. Such a story as that which introduces a fish-waggon, would be naturally referred to the Dutch boers, from whom indeed all the Reynard stories are likely to have come. One curious passage tends to show that the stories are taken, not from the ancient versions of Reynard, but from some interpolated modern rendering. A proof that Jacob Grimm brings forward of the independent, secluded course of the old German Beast- Saga, is, that it did not take up into itself stories long current elsewhere, which would have fitted admirably into it, — thus, for instance, iEsop's story of the Fox who will not go into the Lion's den because he only sees the footsteps going in, but none coming out, is nowhere to be found in the mediaeval Reynard. But we find in the Hot- tentot tales that this very episode has found its way in, and 1 Lane x ■ The Thousand and One Nights,' new edit., London, 1859, vol. i. pp. 84, 114. 2 Jacob Grimm, { Keinhart Fuchs ;' Berlin^ 1834) pp. cxxn\ 1. 30, cclxxii. 12 INTRODUCTION. exactly into its fitting place. u The Lion, it is said, was ill, and they all went to see him in his suffering. But the Jackal did not go, because the traces of the people who went to see him did not turn back." As it happens, we know from other sources enough to ex- plain the appearance in South Africa of stories from Reynard and the Arabian Nights by referring them to European or Moslem influence. But even without such knowledge, the tales themselves prove an historical connection, near or remote, between Europe, Egypt, and South Africa* To try to make such evidence stand alone is a more ambitious task. In a chapter on the Geographical Distribution of Myths, I have compared a series of stories collected on the American Conti- nent with their analogues elsewhere, endeavouring thereby to show an historical connection between the mythology of Ame- rica and that of the rest of the world, but with what success the reader must decide. In another chapter, some remarkable customs, which are found spread over distant tracts of country, are examined in order to ascertain, if possible, whether any historical argument may be" grounded upon them. For the errors which no doubt abound in the present essays, and for the superficial working of a great subject, a word may be said in apology. In discussing questions in which some- times the leading facts have never before been even roughly grouped, it is very difficult not only to reject the wrong evi- dence, but to reproduce the right with accuracy, and the way in which new information comes in, which quite alters the face of the old, does not tend to promote over-confidence in first re- sults. For instance, after having followed other observers in setting down as peculiar to the South Sea Islands, in or near the Samoan group, an ingenious little drilling instrument which will be hereafter described, I found it kept in stock in the London tool shops ; mistakes of this kind must be frequent till our knowledge of the lower civilization is much more tho- roughly collected and sifted. More accuracy might indeed be obtained by keeping to a very small number of subjects, but our accounts of the culture of the lower races, being mostly unclassified, have to be gone through as a whole, and up to a INTRODUCTION. 13 certain point it is a question whether the student of a very limited field might not lose more in largeness of view than he gained by concentration. Whatever be the fate of my argu- ments, any one who collects and groups a mass of evidence, and makes an attempt to turn it to account which may lead to something better, has, I think, a claim to be exempt from any very harsh criticism of mistakes and omissions. As the Knight says in the beginning of his Tale : — " I have, God wot, a large feeld to ere j And wayke ben the oxen in my plough." [Beside ordinary references, I wish to acknowledge separately some particular obligations. My friend Mr, Henry Christy has given me, for years past, not only the benefit of his wide knowledge of ethnography, but also the opportunity of studying the productions of the lower races from the carefully chosen specimens in his great collection. I am in- debted to Dr. W. E. Scott, the Director of the Deaf and Dumb Institu- tion, at Exeter, for much of the assistance which has enabled me to write about the Gesture*Language with something of the confidence of an " expert ;" and I have to thank Prof. Pott, of Halle, and Prof. Lazarus, of Berne, for personal help in several difficult questions. Among books, I have drawn largely from the philological works of Prof. Steinthal, of Berlin, and from the invaluable collection of facts bearing on the history of civilization in the ' Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit,' and 1 Allgemeine Culturvvissenschaft,' of Dr. Gustav Klemm, of Dresden.] 14 CHAPTER II. THE GESTURE- LANGTJ AGE. The power which man possesses of uttering his thoughts is one of the most essential elements of his civilization. Whether he can even think at all without some means of outward expres- sion is a metaphysical question which need not be discussed here. Thus much will hardly be denied by any one, that man's power of utterance, so far exceeding any that the lower animals possess, is one of the principal causes of his immense pre-emi- nence over them. Of the means which man has of uttering or expressing that which is in his mind, speech is by far the most important, so much so that when we speak of uttering our thoughts, the phrase is understood to mean expressing them in words. But when we say that man's power of utterance is one of the great differences between him and the lower animals, we must attach to the word utterance a sense more fully conformable to its etymology. As Steinthal admits, the deaf-and-dumb man is the living refutation of the proposition, that man cannot think without speech, unless we allow the understood notion of speech as the utterance of thought by articulate sounds to be too nar- row. 1 To utter a thought is literally to put it outside us, as to express it is to squeeze it out. Grossly material as these meta- phors are, they are the best terms we have for that wonderful 1 Steinthal, c Ueber die Sprache der Taubstummen' (in Prutz's ' Deutsches Mu- seum,' Jan. to June, 1851, p. 904, etc.). THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 15 process by which a man, by some bodily action, can not only make other men's minds reproduce more or less exactly the workings of his own, but can even receive back from the out- ward sign an impression similar to theirs, as though not he himself, but some one else, had made it. 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 metaphysi- cians in order to discuss it. The Gesture-Language and Pic- ture-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 which are evidently imitative, like " 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. There is, however, no proof that man passed through any intermediate stage, such as the use of gestures, before he spoke. This theory, though by no means contemptible, has, so far as at pre- sent appears, no sufficient support from observed facts. The Gesture-Language, or Language of Signs, is in great part a system of representing objects and ideas by a rude out- line-gesture, imitating their most striking features. It is, as has been well said by a deaf-and-dumb man, tf a picture-lan- guage." Here at once its essential difference from speech be- 16 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. comes evident. Why the words stand and go mean what they do is a question to which we cannot as yet give the shadow of an answer, and if we had been taught to say ' ' stand " where we now say u go/' and " go " where we now say ' ' stand/' it would be practically all the same to us. No doubt there was a sufficient reason for these words receiving the meanings they now bear, as indeed there is a sufficient reason for everything ; but so far as we are concerned, there might as well have been none, for we have quite lost sight of the connection between the word and the idea. But in the gesture -language the rela- tion between idea and sign not only always exists, but is scarcely lost sight of for a moment. When a deaf-and-dumb child holds his two first fingers forked like a pair of legs, and makes them stand and walk upon the table, we want no teaching to show us what this means, nor why it is done. This definition of the gesture-language is, however, not complete. Such objects as are actually in the presence of the speaker, or may be supposed so, are brought bodily into the conversation by touching, pointing, or looking towards them, either to indicate the objects themselves or one of their charac- teristics. Thus if a deaf and dumb man touches his underlip with his forefinger, the context must decide whether he means to indicate the lip itself or the colour ' ' red/' unless, as is some- times done, he shows by actually taking hold of the lip with finger and thumb, that it is the lip itself, and not its quality, that he means. Under the two classes ' ' pictures in the air n and things brought before the mind by actual pointing out, the whole of the sign-language may be included. It is in Deaf and Dumb Institutions that the gesture-lan- guage may be most conveniently studied, and what slight prac- tical knowledge I have of it has been got in this way in Ger- many and in England. In these institutions, however, there are grammatical signs used in the gesture-language which do not fairly belong to it, These are mostly signs adapted, or perhaps invented, by teachers who had the use of speech, to ex- press ideas which do not come within the scope of the very limited natural grammar and dictionary of the deaf-and-dumb. But it is to be observed that though the deaf-and-dumb have THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 17 been taught to understand these signs and use them in school, they ignore them in their ordinary talk, and will have nothing to do with them if they can help it. By dint of instruction, deaf-mutes oan be taught to commu- nicate their thoughts, and to learn from books and men in nearly the same way as we do, though in a more limited de- gree. They learn to read and write, to spell out sentences with the finger-alphabet, and to understand words so spelt by others ; and besides this, they can be taught to speak in articu- late language, though in a hoarse and unmodulated voice, and when another speaks, to follow the motions of his lips almost as though they could hear the words uttered. It may be remarked here, once for all, that the general public often confuses the real deaf-and-dumb language of signs, in which objects and actions are expressed by pantomimic ges- tures, with the deaf-and-dumb finger-alphabet, which is a mere substitute for alphabetic writing. It is not enough to say that the two things are distinct ; they have nothing whatever to do with one another, and have no more resemblance than a picture has to a written description of it. Though of little scientific interest, the finger-alphabet is of great practical use. It appears to have been invented in Spain, to which country the world owes the first systematic deaf-and-dumb teaching, by Juan Pablo Bonet, in whose work a one-handed alphabet is set forth differing but little from that now in use in Germany, or perhaps by his predecessor, Pedro de Ponce. The two-handed or French alphabet, generally used in England, is of newer date. 1 The mother-tongue (so to speak) of the deaf-and-dumb is^ the language of signs. The evidence of the best observers tends to prove that they are capable of developing the gesture^ language out of their own minds without the aid of speaking men. Indeed the deaf-mutes in general surpass the rest of the world in their power of using and understanding signs, and for this simple reason, that though the gesture-language is the common property of all mankind, it is seldom cultivated and 1 Bonet, ■ Reduction de las Letras, y Arte para ensefiar a ablar los Mudos ;' Madrid, 1620 ; pp. 128, etc. Schmalz, ' Ueber die Taubstummen ;' Dresden and Leipzig, 1848 ; pp. 214, 352. C 18 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. developed to so high a degree by those who have the use of speech, as by those who cannot speak, and must therefore have recourse to other means of communication. The opinions of two or three practical observers may be cited to show that the gesture-language is not, like the finger-alphabet, an art learnt in the first instance from the teacher, but an independent pro- cess originating in the mind of the deaf-mute, and developing itself as his knowledge and power of reasoning expand under instruction. Samuel Heinicke, the founder of deaf-and-dumb teaching in Germany, remarks: — "He (the deaf-mute) prefers keeping to his pantomime, which is simple and short, and comes to him fluently as a mother-tongue." 1 Schmalz says : — " Not less com- prehensible are many signs which we indeed do not use in ordi- nary life, but which the deaf-and-dumb child uses, having no means of communicating with others but by signs. These signs consist principally in drawing in the air the shape of objects to be suggested to the mind, indicating their character, imitating the movement of the body in an action to be de- scribed, or the use of a thing, its origin, or any other of its notable peculiarities." 3 " With regard to signs," says Dr. Scott, of Exeter, " the (deaf-and-dumb) child will most likely have already fixed upon signs by which it names most of the objects given in the above lesson (pin, key, etc.), and which it uses in its intercourse with its friends. These signs had always better be retained (by the child's family), and if a word has not received such a sign, endeavour to get the child to fix upon one. It will do this most probably better than you." 3 The Abbe Sicard, one of the first and most eminent of the men who have devoted their lives to the education and "hu- manizing " of these afflicted creatures, has much the same ac- count to give. "It is not I," he says, "who am to invent these signs. I have only to set forth the theory of them under the dictation of their true inventors, those whose language consists of these signs. It is for the deaf-and-dumb to make them, and for me to tell how they are made. They must be 1 Heinicke, { Beobachtungen iiber Stumme,' etc. ; Hamburg, 1778, p. 56. 2 Schmalz, p. 267. 3 Scott, 'The Deaf and Dumb;' London, 1844, p. 84. THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 19 drawn from the nature of the objects they are to represent. It is only the 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 admi- rable master (the Abbe de TEpee) 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 busi- ness to meddle with the invention of signs, giving them abstract values." 1 All these are modern statements; but long before the days of Deaf and Dumb Institutions, Eabelais' 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, afiin que ses gestes vous soyent naifuement propheticques, non fainctz, fardez, ne affectez." Nor are we obliged to depend upon the observations of ordi- nary speaking men for our knowledge of the way in which the gesture-language developes 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 de- scribes their forms for himself in the air, or imitates them in 1 Sicard, 'Cours d'Instruction d'un Sourd-muet;' Paris, 1803, pp. xlv, 18. c2 20 THE GESTURE -LANGUAGE. thought with hands, fingers, and gestures, he developes for himself suitable signs to represent ideas, which serve him as a means of fixing ideas of different kinds in his mind and re- calling them to his memory. And thus he makes himself a language, the so-called gesture- language (Geberden-sjjrache) ; and with these few scanty and imperfect signs, a way for thought is already broken, and with his thought as it now opens out, the language cultivates and forms itself further and further/' 1 I will now give some account of the particular dialect (so to speak) of the gesture-language, which is current in the Berlin Deaf and Dumb Institution. 2 I made a list of about 500 signs, taking them down from my teacher, Carl Wilke, who is himself deaf-and-dumb. They talk of 5000 signs being in common use there, but my list contains the most important. First, as to the signs themselves, the following, taken at random, will give an idea of the general principle on which all are formed. To express the pronouns "I, thou, he," I push my fore- finger against the pit of my stomach for "I;" push it towards the person addressed for " thou;" point with my thumb over my right shoulder for " he ;" and so on. When I hold my right hand flat with the palm down, at the level of my waist, and raise it towards the level of my shoulder, that signifies "great;" but if I depress it instead, it means "little." The sign for ' ' man " is the motion of taking off the hat ; for " woman," the closed hand is laid upon the breast ; for " child," the right elbow is dandled upon the left hand. The adverb "hither" and the verb "to come" have the same sign, beckoning with the finger toward oneself. To hold the first two fingers apart, like a letter V, and dart the finger tips out from the eyes, is to " see." To touch the 1 Kruse, ' Ueber Taubstummen,' etc. ; Schleswig, 1853, p. 51. 2 Whether the " dialects " of the different deaf-and-dumb institutions have re- ceived any considerable proportion of natural signs from one another, as, for in- stance, by the spreading of the system of teaching from Paris, I am unable -to say ; but there is so much in each that differs from the others in detail, though not in principle, that they may, I think, be held as practically independent, ex- cept as regards grammatical signs. THE GESTUKE-LANGUAGE, 21 ear and tongue with the fore-finger, is to "hear" and to "taste." Whatever is to be pointed out, the fore-finger, so appropriately called " index," has to point out or indicate. ". . . atque ipsa videtur Protrahere ad gestum pueros infantia linguae Quom facit ut digito quae sint prsesentia monstrent." 1 To " speak n is to move the lips as in speaking (all the deaf- and-dumb are taught to speak in articulate words in the Berlin establishment), and to move the lips thus, while pointing with the fore-finger out from the mouth, is " name," or "to name," as though one should define it to u point out by speaking." The outline of the shape of roof and walls done in the air with two hands is "house;" with a flat roof it is " room." To smell as at a flower, and then with the two hands make a hori- zontal circle before one, is " garden." To pull up a pinch of flesh from the back of one's hand is "flesh" or "meat." Make the steam curling up from it with the fore-finger, and it becomes " roast meat." Make a bird's bill with two fingers in front of one's lips and flap with the arms, and that means " goose ; " put the first sign and these together, and we have " roast goose." How natural all these imitative signs are. They want no elaborate explanation. To seize the most striking outline of an object, the principal movement of an action, is the whole secret, and this is what the rudest savage can do untaught, nay, what is more, can do better and more easily than the edu- cated man. " None of my teachers here who can speak," said the Director of ihe Institution, " are very strong in the gesture- language. It is difficult for an educated speaking man to get the proficiency in it which a deaf-and-dumb child attains to almost without an effort. It is true that I can use it perfectly; but I have been here forty years, and I made it my business from the first to become thoroughly master of it. To be able to speak is an impediment, not an assistance, in acquiring the ^gesture-language. The habit of thinking in words, and trans- lating these words into signs, is most difficult to shake off; but until this is done, it is hardly possible to place the signs in the 1 Lucretius, v. 1029. 22 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. logical sequence in which they arrange themselves in the mind of the deaf-nmte." As new things come under the notice of the deaf-and-dumb, of course new signs immediately come up for them. So to express " railway " and " locomotive/' the left hand makes a chimney, and the steam curling almost horizontally out is imi- tated with the right fore-finger. The tips of the fingers of the half-closed hand coming towards one like rays of light, is u pho- tograph." But the casual observer, who should take down every sign he saw used in class by masters and pupils, as belonging to the natural gesture-language, would often get a very wrong idea of its nature. Teachers of the deaf-and-dumb have thought it advisable for practical purposes, not merely to use the inde- pendent development of the language of signs, but to add to it and patch it so as to make it more strictly equivalent to their own speech and writing. For this purpose signs have to be introduced, for many words of which the pupil mostly learns the meaning through their use in writing, and is taught to use the sign where he would use the word. Thus, the clenched fists, pushed forward with the thumbs up, mean u yet." To throw the fingers gently open from the temple means " when." To move the closed hands with the thumbs out, up and down upon one's waistcoat, is to " be." All these signs may, it is true, be based upon natural gestures. Dr. Scott, for instance, explains the sign "when" as formed in this way. But this kind of derivation does not give them a claim to be included in the pure gesture-language ; and it really does not seem as though it would make much difference to the children if the sign for "when" were used for "yet," and so on. The Abbe Sicard has left us a voluminous account of the sign-language he used, which may serve as an example of the curious hybrid systems which grow up in this way, by the grafting of the English, or French, or German grammar and dictionary on the gesture-language. Sicard was strongly im- pressed with the necessity of using the natural signs, and even his most arbitrary ones may have been based on such ; but he had set himself to make gestures do whatever words can do, THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE, 23 and was thereby often driven to strange shifts. Yet he either drew so directly from his deaf-and-dumb scholars, or succeeded so well in learning to think in their way, that it is often very hard to say exactly where the influence of spoken or written language comes in. For instance, the deaf-mute borrows the signs of space, as we do similar words, to express notions of time ; and Sicard, keeping to these real signs, and only using them with a degree of analysis which has hardly been attained to but by means of words, makes the present tense of his verb by indicating " here " with the two hands held out, palm down- ward, the past tense by the hand thrown back over the shoulder, "behind," the future by putting the hand out, "forward." But when he takes on his conjugation to such tenses as " I should have carried," he is merely translating words into more or less appropriate signs. Again, by the aid of two fore-fingers hooked together, — to express, I suppose, the notion of depen- dence or connection, — he distinguishes between moi and me, and by translating two abstract grammatical terms from words into signs, he introduces another conception quite foreign to the pure gesture-language. Jf something that has been signed is a substantive, he puts the right hand under the left, to show that it is that which stands underneath; while if it is an adjec- tive, he puts the right hand on the top, to show that it is the quality which lies upon or is added to the substantive below. 1 These partly artificial systems are probably very useful in teaching, but they are not the real gesture-language, and what is more, the foreign element so laboriously introduced seems to have little power of holding its ground there. So far as I can learn, few or none of the factitious grammatical signs will bear even the short journey from the schoolroom to the playground, where there is no longer any verb " to be," where the abstract conjunctions are unknown, and where mere position, quality, action, may serve to describe substantive and adjective alike. At Berlin, as in all deaf-and-dumb institutions, there are numbers of signs which, though most natural in their character, would not be understood beyond the limits of the circle in 1 Sicard, "Theorie des Signes pour 1' Instruction des Sourds-muets;' Paris, 1808, vol. ii. p. 562, etc. A really possible distinction appears in "lip," "red," aide, p. 16. 24 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. which they are used. These are signs which indicate an object hj some accidental peculiarity, and are rather epithets than names. My deaf-and-dumb teacher, for instance, was named among the children by the action of cutting off the left arm with the edge of the right hand ; the reason of this sign was, not that there was anything peculiar about his arms, but that he came from Spandau, and it so happened that one of the children had been at Spandau 3 and had seen there a man with one arm ; thence this epithet of " one-armed " came to be ap- plied to all Spandauers, and to this one in particular. Again, the Royal residence of Charlottenburg was named by taking up one's left knee and nursing it> in allusion apparently to the late king having been laid up with the gout there. In like manner, the children preferred to indicate foreign countries by some characteristic epithet, to spelling out their names on their fingers. Thus England and Englishmen were aptly alluded to by the action of rowing a boat, while the signs of chopping off a head and strangling were used to describe France and Russia, in allusion to the deaths of Louis XYI. and the Emperor Paul, events which seem to have struck the deaf-and-dumb children as the most remarkable in the history of the two countries. These signs are of much higher interest than the grammatical symbols, which can only be kept in use, so to speak, by main force, but these, too, never penetrate into the general body of the language, and are not even permanent in the place where they arise. They die out from one set of children to another, and new ones come up in their stead. The gesture-language has no grammar, properly so called; it knows no inflections of any kind, any more than the Chinese. The same sign stands for "walk," "walkest," "walking," "walked," "walker." Adjectives and verbs are not easily distinguished by the deaf-and-dumb ; " horse-black -handsome- trot-canter," would be the rough translation of the signs by which a deaf-mute would state that a black handsome horse trots and canters. Indeed, our elaborate systems of " parts of speech" are but little applicable to the gesture-language, though, as will be more fully said in another chapter, it may perhaps be possible to trace in spoken language a Dualism, in THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 2o some measure resembling that of the gesture-language, with its two constituent parts, the bringing forward objects and actions in actual fact, and the mere suggestion of them by imi- tation. It has however a syntax, which is worthy of careful ex- amination. The syntax of speaking man differs according to the language he may learn, " equus niger," " a black horse ; " "hominem amo," "j'aime Phomme." But the deaf-mute strings together the signs of the various ideas he wishes to connect, in what appears to be the natural order in which they follow one another in his mind, for it is the same among the mutes of different countries, and is wholly independent of the syntax which may happen to belong to the language of their speaking friends. For instance, their usual construction is not u black horse," but " horse black ; M not " bring a black hat/' but " hat black bring ; * not " I am hungry, give me bread," but " hungry me bread give." The essential independence of the gesture-language may indeed be brought very clearly into view, by noticing that ordinary educated men, when they first begin to learn the language of signs, do not come naturally to the use of its proper syntax, but, by arranging their gestures in the order of the words they think in, make sentences which are unmeaning or misleading to a deaf-mute, unless he can reverse the process, by translating the gestures into words, and considering what such a written sentence would mean. Going once into a deaf-and-dumb school, and setting a boy to write words on the black board, I drew in the air the outline of a tent, and touched the inner part of my under-lip to indicate "red," and the boy wrote accordingly "a red tent." The teacher remarked that I did not seem to be quite a beginner in the sign-language) or I should have translated my English thought verbatim) and put the u red " first. The fundamental principle which regulates the order of the deaf-mute's signs seems to be that enunciated by Schmalz, " that which seems to him the most important he always sets before the rest, and that which seems to him superfluous he leaves out. For instance, to say, f My father gave me an apple/ he makes the sign for ' apple/ then that for ' father/ 26 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. and that for { 1/ without adding that for ' give/ " l The fol- lowing remarks, sent to me by Dr. Scott, seem to agree with this view. " With regard to the two sentences yon give (I struck Tom with a stick, Tom struck me with a stick), the sequence in the introduction of the particular parts would, in some measure, depend on the part that most attention was wished to be drawn towards. If a mere telling of the fact was required, my opinion is that it would be arranged so, ' I-Tom- struck-a-stick/ and the passive form in a similar manner, with the change of Tom first. But these sentences are not gene- rally said by the deaf-and-dumb without their having been interested in the fact, and then, in coming to tell of them, they first give that part they are most anxious to impress upon their hearer. Thus if a boy had struck another boy, and the injured party came to tell us ; if he was desirous to impress us with the idea that a particular boy did it, he would point to the boy first. But if he was anxious to draw attention to his own suffering, rather than to the person by whom it was caused, he would point to himself and make the sign of striking, and then point to the boy ; or if he was wishful to draw attention to the cause of his suffering, he might sign the striking first, and then tell afterwards by whom it was done." Dr. Scott is, so far as I know, the only person who has attempted to lay down a set of distinct rules for the syntax of the gesture -language. 2 u The subject comes before the attri- bute, . . . the object before the action." A third construction is common, though not necessary, u the modifier after the modi- fied." The first construction, by which the horse is put before the ' ' black," enables the deaf-mute to make his syntax supply, to some extent, the distinction between adjective and sub- stantive, which his imitative signs do not themselves express. The other two are well exemplified by a remark of the Abbe Sicard's. "A pupil, to whom I one day put this question, f Who made God ? ' and who replied, ' God made nothing/ left me in no doubt as to this kind of inversion, usual to the deaf-and-dumb, when I went on to ask him, ( Who made the shoe ? ' and he answered, ' The shoe made the shoemaker/ " 3 1 Schmalz, p. 274. 2 Scott, ■ The Deaf and Dumb,' p. 53. 3 Sicard, ' Theorie,' p. xxviii. THE GESTURE -LANGUAGE. 27 So when Laura Bridgman, who was blind as well as deaf-and- dumb, had learnt to communicate ideas by spelling words on her fingers, she would say " Shut door/' ' ' Give book ; " no doubt because she had learnt these sentences whole, but when she made sentences for herself, she would go back to the natural deaf-and-dumb syntax, and spell out "Laura bread give," to ask for bread to be given her, and "water drink Laura," to express that she wanted to drink water. 1 It is to be observed that there is one important part of con- struction which Dr. Scott's rules do not touch, namely, the re- lative position of the actor and the action, the nominative case and the verb. Dr. Schmalz attempts to lay down a partial rule for this. " If the deaf-mute connects the sign for an action with that for a person, to say that the person did this or that, he places, as a general rule, the sign of the action before that of the person. For example, to say, u I knitted," he moves his hands as in knitting, and then points with his fore-finger to his breast. 2 Thus, too, Heinicke remarks that to say, " The carpenter struck me on the arm," he would strike himself on the arm, and then make the sign of planing, 3 as if to say, " I was struck on the arm, the planing-man did it." But though these constructions are, no doubt, right enough as they stand, the rule of precedence according to importance often reverses them. If the deaf-mute wished to throw the emphasis not upon the knitting, but upon himself, he would probably point to him- self first. Kruse gives the construction of u The ship sails on the water" like our own, ' ' ship sail water ;" and of u I must go to bed," as " I bed go." 4 A look of inquiry converts an assertion into a question, and fully serves to make the difference between "The master is come," and "Is the master come?" The interrogative pro- nouns, "who?" "what?" are made by looking or pointing about in an inquiring manner ; in fact, by a number of unsuc- cessful attempts to say, "he," "that." The deaf-and-dumb child's way of asking, "Who has beaten you?" would be, "You beaten; who was it?" Though it is possible to render 1 Steinthal, Spr. der T., p. 923. 2 Schmalz, pp. 274, 58. 3 Heinicke, p. 56. 4 Kruse, p. 57. 28 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. a great mass of simple statements or questions, almost gesture for word, the concretism of thought which belongs to the deaf- mute whose mind has not been much developed by the use of written language, and even to the educated one when he is thinking and uttering his thoughts in his native signs, com- monly requires more complex phrases to be re-cast. A ques- tion so common amongst us as, "What is the matter with you V* would be put, " You crying ? you been beaten ?" and so on. The deaf-and-dumb child does not ask, " 'What did you have for dinner yesterday ?" but ' ' Did you have soup ? did you have porridge?" and so forth. A conjunctive sentence he ex- presses by an alternative or contrast ; " I should be punished if I were lazy and naughty," would be put, " I lazy, naughty, no ! — lazy, naughty, I punished, yes \" Obligation may be expressed in a similar way; "I must love and honour my teacher," may be put, " teacher, I beat, deceive, scold, no ! — I love, honour, yes ! M As Steinthal says in his admirable essay, it is only the certainty which speech gives to a man's mind in holding fast ideas in all their relations, which brings him to the shorter course of expressing only the positive side of the idea, and dropping the negative. 1 What is expressed by the genitive case, or a corresponding preposition, may have a distinct sign of holding in the gesture- language. The three signs to express " the gardener's knife," might be the knife, the garden, and the action of grasping the knife, pressing it to his breast, putting it into his pocket, or something of the kind. But the mere putting together of the possessor and the possessed may answer the purpose, as is well shown by the way in which a deaf-and,-dumb man designates his wife's daughter's husband and children in making his will by signs. The following account is taken from the f Justice of the Peace,' October 1, 1864 :— John Geale, of Yateley, yeoman, deaf, dumb, and unable to read or write, died leaving a will which he had executed by putting his mark to it. Probate of this will was refused by Sir J. P. Wilde, Judge of the Court of Probate, on the ground that there was no sufficient evidence of the testator's under- 1 Kruse, p. 56, etc. Steinthal, Spr. der T., p. 923. THE GESTURE-LANG CAGE. 29 standing and assenting to its provisions. At a later date, Dr. Spinks renewed the motion upon the following joint affi- davit of the widow and the attesting witnesses : — w The signs by which deceased informed us that the will was the instrument which was to deal with his property upon his death, and that his wife was to have all his property after his death in case she survived him, were in substance, so far as we are able to de- scribe the same in writing, as follows, viz.: — The said John Geale first pointed to the said will itself, then he pointed to himself, and then he laid the side of his head upon the palm of his right hand with his eyes closed, and then lowered his right hand towards the ground, the palm of the same hand being up- wards. These latter signs were the usual signs by which he referred to his own death or the decease of some one else. He then touched his trousers pocket (which was the usual sign by which he referred to his money), then he looked all round and simultaneously raised his arms with a sweeping motion all round (which were the usual signs by which he referred to all his property or all things). He then pointed to his wife, and afterwards touched the ring-finger of his left hand, and then placed his right hand across his left arm at the elbow, which latter signs were the usual signs by which he referred to his wife. The signs by which the said testator informed us that his property was to go to his wife's daughter, in case his wife died in his lifetime, were ... as follows : — He first referred to his property as before, he then touched himself, and pointed to the ring-finger of his left hand, and crossed his arm as before (which indicated his wife) ; he then laid the side of his head on the palm of his right hand (with his eyes closed), which indi- cated his wife's death; he then again, after pointing to his wife's daughter, who was present when the said will was exe- cuted, pointed to the ring-finger of his left hand, and then placed his right hand across his left arm at the elbow as before, He then put his forefinger to his mouth, and immediately touched his breast, and moved his arms in sueh a manner as to indicate a child, which were his usual signs^or indicating his wife's daughter. He always indicated a female by crossing his arm, and a male person by crossing his wrist. The signs by which 30 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. the said testator informed us that his property was to go to William Wigg (his wife's daughter's husband), in case his wife's daughter died in his lifetime, were ... as follows : — He repeated the signs indicating his property and his wife's daughter, then laid the side of his head on the palm of his right hand with his eyes closed, and lowered his hand towards the ground as before (which meant her death) ; he then again repeated the signs indicating his wife's daughter, and crossed his left arm at the wrist with his right hand, which meant her husband, the said William Wigg. He also communicated to us by signs, that the said William Wigg resided in London. The said William Wigg is in the employ of and superintends the goods department of the North- Western Railway Company at Camden Town. The signs by which the said testator in- formed us that his property was to go to the children of his wife's daughter and son-in-law, in case they both died in his lifetime, were ... as follows, namely : — He repeated the signs indicating the said William Wigg and his wife, and their death before him, and then placed his right hand open a short dis- tance from the ground, and raised it by degrees, and as if by steps, which were his usual signs for pointing out their children, and then swept his hand round with a sweeping motion, which indicated that they were all to be brought in. The said tes- tator always took great notice of the said children, and was very fond of them. After the testator had in manner aforesaid expressed to us what he intended to do by his said will, the said R. T. Dunning, by means of the before-mentioned signs, and by other motions and signs by which we were accustomed to converse with him, informed the said testator what were the contents and effect of the said will. " Sir J. P. Wilde granted the motion." The deaf-mute commonly expresses past and future time in a concrete form, or by implication. To say " I have been ill," he may convey the idea of his being ill by looking as though he were so, pressing in his cheeks with thumb and finger to give himself a lantern-jawed look, putting his hand to his head, etc., and he may show that this event was " a day behind," " a week behind," that is to say yesterday or a week ago, and so THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 31 he may say that he is going home " a week forward." That he would of himself make the abstract past or future, as the Abbe Sicard has it, by throwing the hand back or forward, with- out specifying any particular period, I am not prepared to say. The difficulty may be avoided by signing " my brother sick done" for " My brother has been sick," as to imply that the sickness is a thing finished and done with. Or the ex- pression of face and gesture may often tell what is meant. The expression with which the sign for eating dinner is made will tell whether the speaker has had his dinner or is going to it. When anything pleasant or painful is mentioned by signs, the look will commonly convey the distinction between remembrance of what is past, and anticipation of what is to come. Though the deaf and dumb has, much as we have, an idea of the connection of cause and effect, he has not, I think, any di- rect means of distinguishing causation from mere sequence or simultaneity, except a way of showing by his manner that two events belong to one another, which can hardly be described in words, though if he sees further explanation necessary, he has no difficulty in giving it. Thus he would express the statement that a man died of drinking, by saying that he " died, drank, drank, drank." If the inquiry were made, u died, did he ?" he could put the causation beyond doubt by answering, " yes, he drank, and drank, and drank !" If he wished to say that the gardener had poisoned himself, the order of his signs would be, " gardener dead, medicine bad drank." To "make" is too abstract an idea for the deaf-mute; to show that the tailor makes the coat, or that the carpenter makes the table, he would represent the tailor sewing the coat, and the carpenter sawing and planing the table. Such a pro- position as " Rain makes the land fruitful" would not come into his way of thinking ; " rain fall, plants grow," would be his pictorial expression. 1 As an example of the structure of the gesture-language, I give the words roughly corresponding to the signs by which the Lord's Prayer is acted every morning at the Edinburgh In- 1 Steinthal, Spr. der. T., p. 923. 32 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. stitution. They were carefully written down for me by the Director, and I made notes of the signs by which the various ideas were expressed in this school. " Father" is represented in the prayer as u man old/' though in ordinary matters he is generally " the man who shaves himself f* "name" is, as I have seen it elsewhere, touching the forehead and imitating the action of spelling on the fingers, as to say, " the spelling one is known by." To "hallow" is to "speak good of" ("good" being expressed by the thumb, while " bad" is represented by the little finger, two signs of which the meaning lies in the contrast of the larger and more powerful thumb with the smaller and less important little finger) . " Kingdom" is shown by the sign for " crown f* " will," by placing the hand on the stomach, in accordance with the natural and wide-spread theory that desire and passion are located there, to which theory such expressions belong as " to have no stomach to it." " Done " is l{ worked," shown by hands as working. The phrase " on earth as it is in heaven " was, I believe, put by signs for " on earth " and " in heaven," and then by putting out the two fore-fingers side by side, the sign for sameness and similarity all the world over, so that the whole would stand, " earth on, heaven in, just the same." i( Trespass" is {i doing bad;" to " forgive" is to rub out, as from a slate ; " tempta- tion" is plucking one by the coat, as to lead him slily into mischief. The alternative "but" is made with the two fore- fingers, not alongside of one another as in " like," but opposed point to point, Sicard's sign for "against." "Deliver" is to " pluck out," f ( glory" is " glittering," " for ever*' is shown by making the fore-fingers held horizontally turn round and round one another. The order of the signs is much as follows : — " Father our, heaven in — name thy hallowed — kingdom thy come — will thy done-dearth on, heaven in, as. Bread give us daily^trespasses our forgive us, them trespass against us, forgive, as. Temp- tation lead not — but evil deliver from — kingdom power glory thine for ever." When I write down descriptions in words of the deaf-and- dumb signs, they seem bald and weak, but it must be remem- TIIE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 33 bered tliat I can only write down the skeletons of them. To . see them is something very different, for these dry bones have to be covered with flesh. Not the face only, bnt the whole body joins in giving expression to the sign. Nor are the sober, restrained looks and gestures to which we are accustomed in our daily life sufficient for this. He who talks to the deaf-and- dumb in their own language, must throw off the rigid covering that the Englishman wears over his face like a tragic mask, that never changes its expression while love and hate, joy and sorrow, come out from behind it, Eeligious service is performed in signs in many deaf-and- dumb schools. In the Berlin Institution, the simple Lutheran service, a prayer, the gospel for the day, and a sermon, is acted every Sunday morning in the gesture-language for the children in the school and the deaf-and-dumb inhabitants of the city, and it is a very remarkable sight. No one could see the parable of the man who left the ninety and nine sheep in the wilderness, and went after that which was lost, or of the wo- man who lost the one piece of silver, performed in expressive pantomime by a master in the art, without acknowledging that for telling a simple story and making simple comments on it, spoken language stands far behind acting. The spoken narra- tive must lose the sudden anxiety of the shepherd when he counts his flock and finds a sheep wanting, his hurried penning up the rest, his running up hill and down dale, and spying backwards and forwards, his face lighting up when he catches sight of the missing sheep in the distance, his carrying it home in his arms, hugging it as he goes. We hear these stories read as though they were lists of generations of antediluvian patriarchs. The deaf-and-dumb pantomime calls to mind the "action, action, action !" of Demosthenes, 34 CHAPTER III. THE GESTURE r LANGUAGE— (continued). There is another department of the gesture-language which has reached nearly as high a development as that in use among the deaf-mutes. Men who do not know one another's language are to each other as though they were dumb. Thus Sophocles uses ayXcoo-Q-os, " tongueless/' for "barbarian/' as contrasted with " Greek ;" and the Russians,, to this day, call their neigh- bours the Germans, f -Njemez/' — that is, speechless, njemou meaning dumb. When men who are thus dumb to one another have to communicate without an interpreter, they adopt all over the world the very same method of communi- cation by signs, which is the natural language of the deaf- mutes. Alexander von Humboldt has left on record, in the following passage, his experiences of the gesture-language among the Indians of the Orinoco, in districts where it often happens that small, isolated tribes speak languages of which even their near- est neighbours can hardly understand a word : — " c After you leave my mission/ said the good monk of Uruana, 'you will travel like mutes.'' This prediction was almost accomplished ; and, not to lose all the advantage that is to be had from inter- course even with the most brutalized Indians, we have some- times preferred the language of signs. As soon as the native sees that you do not care to employ an interpreter, as soon as you ask him direct questions, pointing the object out to him, THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 35 he comes out of his habitual apathy, and displays a rare intel- ligence in making himself understood. He varies his signs, pronounces his words slowly, and repeats them without being asked. His amour-propre seems flattered by the consequence you accord to him by letting him instruct you. This facility of making himself understood is above all remarkable in the inde- pendent Indian, and in the Christian missions I should recom- mend the traveller to address himself in preference to those of the natives who have been but lately reduced, or who go back from time to time to the forest to enjoy their ancient liberty." 1 It is well known that the Indians of North America, whose nomade habits and immense variety of languages must continu- ally make it needful for them to communicate with tribes whose language they cannot speak, carry the gesture-language to a high degree of perfection, and the same signs serve as a me- dium of converse from Hudson's Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Several writers make mention of this t{ Indian pantomime/' and it has been carefully described in the account of Major Long's expedition, and more recently by Captain Burton. 2 The latter traveller considers it to be a mixture of natural and con- ventional signs, but so far as I can judge from the one hundred and fifty or so which he describes, and those I find mentioned elsewhere, I do not believe that there is a really arbitrary sign among them. There are only about half-a-dozen of which the meaning is not at once evident, and even these appear on close inspection to be natural signs, perhaps a little abbreviated or conventionalized. I am sure that a skilled deaf-and-dumb talker would understand an Indian interpreter, and be himself understood at first sight, with scarcely any difficulty. The Indian pantomime and the gesture-language of the deaf-and- dumb are but different dialects of the same language of nature. Burton says that an interpreter who knows all the signs is pre- ferred by the whites even to a good speaker. "A story is 1 Humboldt and Bonpland, 'Voyage;' Paris, 1811, etc. vol. ii. p. 278. 2 Edwin James, Major Stephen H. Long's Exped. Kocky Moun. ; Philadelphia, 1823, i. p. 378, etc. Capt. R. F. Burton, ' The City of the Saints,' London, 1861, p. 150, etc. See also Prinz Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied, • Voyage dans l'lnte- rieur de l'Amerique du Nord ;' Paris, 1840-3, vol. hi. p. 389, etc. d2 36 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. told of a man, who, being sent among the Cheyennes to qualify himself for interpreting, returned in a week and proved his competence : all that he did, however, was to go through the usual pantomime with a running accompaniment of grunts." In the Indian pantomime, actions and objects are expressed very much as a deaf-mute would show them. The action of beckoning towards oneself represents to " come f* darting the two first fingers from the eyes is to " see ;" describing in the air the form of the pipe and the curling smoke is to " smoke ; M thrusting the hand under the clothing of the left breast is to "hide, put away, keep secret." " Enough to eat" is shown by an imitation of eating, and the forefingers and thumb form- ing a C, with the points towards the body, are raised upward as far as the neck j ts fear," by putting the hands to the lower ribs, and showing how the heart flutters and seems to rise to the throat ; " book," by holding the palms together before the face, opening and reading, quite in deaf-and-dumb fashion, and as the Moslems often do while they are reciting prayers and chapters of the Koran. One of our accounts says that M fire " is represented by the Indian by blowing it and warming his hands at it ; the other that flames are imitated with the fingers. The latter sign was in use at Berlin, but I noticed that the children in another school did not understand it till the sign of blowing was added. The Indian and the deaf-mute indicate " rain " by the same sign, bringing the tips of the fingers of the partly-closed hand down- ward, like rain falling from the clouds, and the Indian makes the same sign do duty for ' ( year," oounting years by annual rains. The Indian indicates " stone," if light, by picking it up, if heavy, by dropping it. The deaf-mute taps his teeth with his finger-nail to show that it is something hard, and then makes the gesture of flinging it. The Indian sign for mount- ing a horse is to make a pair of legs of the two first fingers of the right hand, and to straddle them across the left fore- finger ; a similar sign among the deaf-and-dumb means to "ride." Among the Indians the sign for "brother" or "sister" is, according to Burton, to put the two first finger-tips (that is, I THE GESTUKE-LANGUAGE. 37 suppose, the fore-fingers of both hands) into the mouth, to show- that both fed from the same breast ; the deaf-mute makes the mere sign of likeness or equality suffice, holding out the fore- fingers, of both hands close together, a sign which, according to James, also does duty to indicate " husband M or " companion." This sign of the two fore-fingers is understood everywhere, and some very curious instances of its use in remote parts of the world are given by Marsh 1 in illustration of Fluellen's " But 'tis all one, 'tis so like as my fingers is to my fingers." It be- longs, too, to the sign-language of the Cistercian monks. Animals are represented in the Indian pantomime very much as the deaf-and-dumb would represent them, by signs charac- terizing their peculiar ears, horns, etc., and their movements. Thus the sign for " stag" among the deaf-and-dumb, namely, the thumbs to both temples, and the fingers widely spread out, is almost identical with the Indian gesture. For the dog, how- ever, the Indians have a remarkable sign, which consists in trailing the two first fingers of the right hand, as if they were poles dragged along the ground. Before the Indians had horses, the dogs were trained to drag the lodge-poles on the march in this way, and in Catlin's time the work was in several tribes divided between the dogs and the horses ; but it appears that in tribes Where the trailing is now done by horses only, the sign for " dog" derived from the old custom is still kept up. One of the Indian signs is curious as having reflected itself in the spoken language of the country. " Water " is represented by an imitation of scooping up water with the hand and drink- ing out of it, and " river " by making this sign, and then wav- ing the palms of the hands outward, to denote an extended surface. It is evident that the first part of the sign is translated in the western Americanism which speaks of a river as a €l drink," and of the Mississippi, par excellence, as the " Big Drink." 2 It need hardly be said that spoken language is full of such translations from gestures, as when one is said to wink at another's faults, an expression which shows us the act of 1 Marsh, * Lectures on the English Language ;' London, 1862, p. 486. 2 J. E. Bartlett, ' Dictionary of Americanisms,' 2nd edit., Boston, 1859, s. v. " Drink," 38 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. winking accepted as a gesture-sign, meaning to pretend not to see. But the Americanism is interesting as being caught so near its source. I noted down a few signs from Burton as not self-evident, but it will be seen that they are all to be explained. They are, " yes," wave the hands straight forward from the face ; " no," wave the hand from right to left as if motioning away. These signs correspond with the general practice of mankind, to nod for "yes," and shake the head for "no." The idea conveyed by nodding seems to correspond with the deaf-and-dumb sign for u truth," made by moving the finger straightforward from the lips, apparently with the sense of " straightforward speak- ing," while the finger is moved to one side to express " lie," as " sideways speaking." The understanding of nodding and shaking the head as signs of assent and denial appears to belong to uneducated deaf-and-dumb children, and even to those who are only one degree higher than idiots. In a very remarkable dissertation on the art of thrusting knowledge into the minds of such children, Schmalz assumes that they can always make and understand these signs. 1 It is true they may have learnt them from the people who take care of them. This explanation is, however, somewhat complicated by the Indian signs for "truth" and "lie," given by Burton, who says that the fore-finger extended from the mouth means to " tell truth," "one word;" but two fingers mean to tell lies," " double tongue." So to move two fingers before the left breast means, "I don't know," that is to say, "I have two hearts." I found that deaf-and-dumb children understood this Indian sign for " lie " quite as well as their own. " Good," wave the hand from the mouth, extending the thumb from the index, and closing the other three fingers. This is like kissing the hand as a salutation, or what children call " blowing a kiss," and it is clearly a natural sign, as it is recognized by the deaf-and-dumb language. Dr. James gives the Indian sign as waving the hand with the back upward, in a horizontal curve outwards, the well-known gesture of bene- diction. At Berlin, a gesture like that of patting a child on 1 Schmalz, pp. 267-277. But see Bastian, vol. i. p. 395. THE GESTUKE- LANGUAGE. 39 the head, accompanied, as of course all these signs are, with an approving smile, is in use. Possibly the ideas of stroking or patting may lie at the bottom of all these signs of approving and blessing. H Think," pass the fore-finger sharply across the breast from right to left, meaning of course that a thought passes through one's heart. " Trade, exchange, swop/' cross the fore*fingers of both hands before the breast. Thi's sign is also used, Captain Burton says, to denote Americans, or indeed any white men, who are ge- nerally called by the Indians west of the Rocky Mountains, " shwop," from their trading propensities* As given by Burton, the sign is hardly intelligible* But Dr. James describes the gesture of which this is a sort of abridgement which consists in holding up the two fore^fingers, and passing them by each other transversely in front of the breast so that they change places, and nothing could be clearer than this* The sign in the Berlin gesture -language for " day w is made by opening out the palms of the hands. I supposed it to be an arbitrary and meaningless sign, till I found the Indian sign for u this morning " to consist in the same gesture. It refers, perhaps, to awaking from sleep, or to the opening out of the day. As a means of communication, there is no doubt that the Indian pantomime is not merely capable of expressing a few -/^ simple and ordinary notions, but that, to the uncultured savage, with his few and material ideas, it is a very fair substitute for his scanty vocabulary. Stansbury mentions a discourse de- livered in this way in his presence, which lasted for some hours occupied in continuous narration* The only specimen of a connected story I have met with is a hunter's simple history of his day's sport, as Captain Burton thinks that an Indian would render it in signs. The story to be told is as follows : — " Early this morning, I mounted my horse, rode off at a gallop, traversed a kanyon or ravine, then over a mountain to a plain where there was no water, sighted bison, followed them, killed three of them, skinned them, packed the flesh upon my pony, remounted, and returned home*" The arrangement of the 40 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. signs described is as follows : — " I — this morning — early — mounted my horse — galloped — a kanyon — crossed — a moun- tain — a plain — drink — no ! — sighted — bison- — killed — three — skinned — packed flesh — mounted — hither." There is perhaps nothing which would strike a deaf-and-dumb man as pecu- liar in the sequence of these signs ; but it would be desirable for a real discourse, delivered by an Indian in signs, to be taken down, especially if its contents were of a more com- plex nature. Among the Cistercian monks there exists, or existed, a ges- ture-language. As a part of their dismal system of mortifying the deeds of the body, they held speech, except in religious exercises, to be sinful. But for certain purposes relating to the vile material life that they could not quite shake off, communi- cation among the brethren was necessary, so the difficulty was met by the use of pantomimic signs. Two of their written lists or dictionaries are printed in the collected edition of Leib- nitz's works, 1 one in Latin, the other in Low German ; they are not identical, but appear to be mostly or altogether derived from a list drawn up by authority. A great part of the Cistercian gesture-signs are either just what the deaf-and-dumb would make, or are so natural that they would at once understand them. Thus, to make a roof with the fingers is '" house ; " to grind the fists together is " cornj " to " sing " is indicated by beating time ; to u bathe" is to imitate washing the breast with the hollow of the hand ; ' c candle," or " fire," is shown by holding up the fore-finger and blowing it out like a candle ; a " goat " is indicated by the fingers hanging from the chin like a beard -> " salt," by taking an imaginary pinch and sprinkling it 5 "butter," by the action of spreading it in the palm of the hand. The deaf- and-dumb sign used at Berlin and other places to indicate " time " by drawing the tip of the forefinger up the arm, is in the Cistercian list " a year $ " it is Sicard's sign for " long," and the idea it conveys is plainly that of " a length " transferred from space to time. To u go " is to make the two first fingers walk hanging in the air (Hengestu se dahl und rorest se, 1 Leibnitz, Opera Omnia, ed. Dutens ; Geneva, 1768, vol. vi. part ii., p. 207, etc, THE GESTUKE-LANGUAGE. 41 betekend Gahen), while the universal sign of the two fore- fingers stands for u like" (Holstu se even thosamen, dat bete- kent like). The sign for "beer " is to put the hand before the face and blow into it, as if blowing off the froth (Thustu de hand vor dem anschlahe dat du darin pustest, dat bediidt gut Bier). Wiping your mouth with the whole hand upwards (cum omnibus digitis terge buccam sursum), means a country- clown (rusticus). To put the fore-finger against the closed lips is " silence," but the finger put in the mouth means a " child." These are two very natural and distinct signs j but then the finger to the lips for " silence " may serve also quite fitly to show that a child so represented is an infant, that is, that it cannot speak. The confusion of the signs of "childhood" and "silence" once led to a curious misunderstanding. The infant Horus, god of the dawn, was appropriately represented by the Egyptians as a child with his fingers to his lips, and his name as written in the hieroglyphics (Fig. 1 ) may be read Har-(p)-chrot, u Horus- (the) -son." 1 The Greeks mistook the meaning of the gesture, and (as it seems) Graecizing this name into Harpo- crates, adopted him as the god of silence. ^g- 1? To conclude, the Cistercian lists contain a number of signs which at first sight seem conventional, but yet a meaning may be discerned in most or all of them. Thus, it seems foolish to make two fingers at the right side of one's nose stand for " friend ;" but when we see that placed on the left side, they stand for " enemy," it becomes clear that it is the opposition of right and left that is meant. So the little finger to the tip of the nose means " fool," which seemingly poor sign is ex- plained by the fore-finger being put there for u wise man." The fact of such a contrast as wise and foolish being made be- tween the fore-finger and the little finger, corresponds with the use of the thumb and little finger for " good" and " bad" by the deaf-and-dumb, and makes it likely that both pairs of signs 1 Coptic Tchroti (ni) = lilii, liberi, hroti = cognatus, filius. Old Eg. in Rosetta Ins. Compare S. Sharpe, Hist, of Egypt, 4th ed. vol. ii. p. 148. Wilkinson, * Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians ;' London, 1854, vol. ii. p. 182. A 42 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. may be natural, and independent of one another. The sign of grasping the nose with the crooked fore-finger for "wine/' suggests that the thought of a jolly red nose was present even in so unlikely a place. The sign for " the devil/' gripping one's chin with all five fingers, shows the enemy seizing a victim, and compares curiously with a passage in an Indian tale, where it is not an evil demon, but Old Age in person, who comes to claim his own. " In time then, when I had grown grey with years, Old Age took me by the chin, and in his love to me said kindly, ' My son, what doest thou yet in the house?' " l There is yet another development of the gesture-language to be noticed, the stage performances of the professional mimics of Greece and Rome, the Pantomime par excellence. To judge by two welUknown anecdotes, the old mimes had brought their art to great perfection. Macrobius says it was a well- known fact that Cicero used to try with Roscius the actor which of them could express a sentiment in the greater variety of ways, the player by mimicry or the orator by speech, and that these experiments gave Roscius such confidence in his art, that he wrote a book comparing oratory with acting. 2 Lucian tells a story of a certain barbarian prince of Pontus, who was at Nero's court, and saw a pantomime perform so well, that, though he could not understand the songs which the player was accompanying with his gestures, he could fol- low the performance from the acting alone. When Nero after- wards asked the prince to choose what he would have for a present, he begged to have the player given to him, saying that it was difficult to get interpreters to communicate with some of the tribes in his neighbourhood who spoke different languages, but that this man would answer the purpose per- fectly. 3 It would seem from these stories that the ancient panto- mimes generally used gestures so natural that their meaning was self-evident, but a remark of St. Augustine's intimates that 1 ' Mahrchensammlung des Somadeva Bhatta' (trans, by Dr. H. Brockhaus) ; Leipzig, 1843, ii. p. 96. 2 Macrob. Saturn, lib. ii. c. x* 3 Lucian. De Saltatione, 64. THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 43 signs understood only by regular playgoers were also used. " For all those things which are valid among men, because it pleases them to agree that they shall be so, are human insti- tutions. ... So if the signs which mimes make in their per- formances had their meaning from nature, and not from the agreement and ordinance of men, the crier in old times would not have given out to the Carthaginians at the play what the actor meant to express, a thing still remembered by many old men by whom we use to hear it said; which is readily to be believed, seeing that even now, if any one who is not learned in such follies goes into the theatre, unless some one else tells him what the signs mean, he can make nothing of them. All men, indeed, desire a certain likeness in sign-making, that the signs should be as like as may be to that which is signified ; but seeing that things may be like one another in many ways, such signs are not constant among men, unless by common consent." 1 Knowing what we do of mimic performances from other sources, we can, I think, only understand by this that natural gestures were very commonly conventionalized and abridged to save time and trouble, and not that arbitrary signs were used; and such abridgments, like the simplified sign for trading or swopping among the Indians, as well as the whole class of epithets and allusions which would grow up among mimics addressing their regular set of playgoers, would not be intelligible to a stranger. Christians, of course, did not frequent such performances in St. Augustine's time, but looked upon them as utterly abominable and devilish; nor can we accuse them of want of charity for this, when we consider the class of scenes that Were commonly chosen for representation. There seem to have been written lists of signs used to learn from, which are now lost. 2 The mimic, it should be observed, had not the same difficulties to contend with as an Indian in- terpreter. In the first place, the stories represented were generally mythological, very usually love-passages of the gods and heroes, with which the whole audience was perfectly fami- 1 Aug. Doct. Chr. ii, 25. 2 Grysar, in Erseh and Gruber, art. " Pantomimische Kunst der Alien." 44 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. liar; and, moreover, appropriate words were commonly sung while the mimic acted, so that he could apply all his skill to .giving artistic illustrations of the tale as it went on. The pan- tomimic performances of Southern Europe may be taken as representing in some degree the ancient art, but it is likely that the mimicry in the modern ballet and the Eastern pan- tomimic plays falls much below the classical standard of excellence. I have now noticed what I venture to call the principal dialects of the gesture -language. It is fit, however, that, gesture- signs having been spoken of as forming a complete and independent language by themselves, something should be said of their use as an accompaniment to spoken language. We in England make comparatively little use of these signs, but they have been and are in use in all quarters of the world as highly important aids to conversation. Thus, Captain Cook says of the Tahitians, after mentioning their habit of counting upon their fingers, that " in other instances, we observed that, when they were conversing with each other, they joined signs to their words, which were so expressive that a stranger might easily apprehend their meaning;" 1 and Charlevoix describes, in almost the same words, the expressive pantomime with which an Indian orator accompanied his discourse. 2 Gesticulation goes along with speech, to explain and em- phasize it, among all mankind. Savage and half - civilized races accompany their talk with expressive pantomime much more than nations of higher culture. The continual gesticu- lation of Hindoos, Arabs, Neapolitans, as contrasted with the more northern nations of Europe, strikes every traveller who sees them. But we cannot lay down a rule that gesticulation decreases as civilization advances, and say, for instance, that a Southern Frenchman, because his talk is illustrated with ges- tures, as a book with pictures, is less civilized than a German or an Euglishman. We English are perhaps poorer in the gesture-language than any other people in the world. We use a form of words to 1 Cook, First Voyage, in Hawke3worth's Voyages ; London, 1773, vol. ii. p. 228. 2 Charlevoix, vol. i. p. 413. THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 45 denote what a gesture or a tone would express. Perhaps it is because we read and write so much, and have come to think and talk as we should write, and so let fall those aids to speech which cannot be carried into the written language. The few gesture-signs which are in common use among our- selves are by no means unworthy of examination ; but we have lived for so many centuries in a highly artificial state of society, that some of them cannot be interpreted with any certainty, and the most that we can do is to make a good guess at their original meaning. Some, it is true, such as beckoning or mo- tioning away with the hand, shaking the fist, etc., carry their explanation with them ; and others may be plausibly explained by a comparison with analogous signs used by speaking men in other parts of the world, and by the deaf-and-dumb. Thus, the sign of " snapping one's fingers n is not very intelligible as we generally see it ; but when we notice that the same sign made quite gently, as if rolling some tiny object away between the finger and thumb, or the sign of flipping it away with the thumb-nail and fore-finger, are usual and well-understood deaf- and-dumb gestures, denoting anything tiny, insignificant, con- temptible, it seems as though we had exaggerated and con- ventionalized a perfectly natural action so as to lose sight of its original meaning. There is a curious mention of this ges- ture by Strabo. At Anchiale, he writes, Aristobulus says there is a monument to Sardanapalus, and a stone statue of him as if snapping his fingers, and this inscription in Assyrian letters : — " Sardanapallus, the son of Anacyndaraxes, built in one day Anchiale and Tarsus. Eat, drink, play ; the rest is not worth that!" 1 Shaking hands is not a custom which belongs naturally to all mankind, and we may sometimes trace its introduction into countries where it was before unknown. The Fijians, for in- stance, who used to salute by smelling or sniffing at one another, have learnt to shake hands from the missionaries. 3 The Wa-nika, near Mombaz, grasp hands ; but they use the 1 Strabo, xiv. 5, 9. 2 Rev. Thos. Williams, c Fiji and the Fijians,' 2nd ed. ; London, 1860, vol. i. p. 153. 46 THE GESTUKE-LANGUAGE. Moslem variety of the gesture, which is to press the thumbs against one another as well/ and this makes it all but certain that the practice is one of the many effects of Moslem influence in East Africa. It is commonly thought that the Ked Indians adopted the custom of shaking hands from the white men. 2 This may be true; but there is reason to suppose that the expression of alliance or friendship by clasping hands was already familiar to them, so that they would readily adopt it as a form of saluta- tion, if they had not used it so before the arrival of the Euro- peans. More than a century ago, Charlevoix noticed in the Indian picture-writing the expression of alliance by the figure of two men holding each other by one hand, while each grasped a calumet in the other hand. 3 In one of the Indian pictures given by Schoolcraft, close affection is represented by two bodies united by a single arm (see Fig. 6) ; and in a pictorial message sent from an Indian tribe to the President of the United States, an eagle, which represents a chief, is holding out a hand to the President, who also holds out a hand. 4 The last of these pictured signs may be perhaps ascribed to Euro- pean influence, but hardly the first two. We could scarcely find a better illustration of the meaning of the gesture of joining hands than in its use as a sign of the marriage contract. One of the ceremonies of a Moslem wed- ding consists in the bridegroom and the bride's proxy sitting upon the ground, face to face, with one knee on the ground, and grasping each other's right hands, raising the thumbs and pressing them against each other, 5 or in the almost identical ceremony in the Pacific Islands, in which the bride and bride- groom are placed on a large white cloth, spread on the pave- ment of a marae, and join hands, 6 This as evidently means that 1 Krapf, ' Travels, etc., in East Afrioa ; ' Loudon, 1860, p. 138. 2 H. R. Schoolcraft, ■ Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, etc., of the Indian Tribes of the U. S, ; ' Philadelphia, 1851 , etc., part iii. pp. 212, 244, Burton, ' City of the Saints,' p. 144. But see also Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 263, 3 Charlevoix, vol. v. p. 440. 4 Schoolcraft, part i. pp. 403, 418. « E. W. Lane, ' Modern Egyptians ; ' London, 1837, vol i. p. 219. 6 Rev. W. Ellis, ■ Polynesian Researches ; ' London, 1830, vol. ii. p. 569. THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 47 the man and wife are joined together, as the corresponding ceremony in the ancient Mexican and the modern Hindoo wedding, in which the clothes of the parties are tied together in a knot. Among onr own Aryan race, the taking hands was a usual ceremony in marriage in the Vedic period. 1 The idea which shaking hands was originally intended to convey, was clearly that of fastening together in peace and friendship ; and the same thought appears in the probable etymology of peace, pax, Sanskrit pag, to bind, and in league from ligare. Cowering or crouching is so natural an expression of fear or inability to resist, that it belongs to the brutes as well as to man. Among ourselves this natural sign of submission is generally used in the modified forms of bowing and kneeling ; but the analogous gestures found in different countries not only give us the intermediate stages between an actual prostra- tion and a slight bow, but also a set of gestures and cere- monies which are merely suggestive of a prostration which is not actually performed. The extreme act of lying with the face in the dust is not only usual in China, Siaru, etc., but even in Siberia the peasant grovels on the ground and kisses the dust before a man of rank. The Arab only suggests such a humiliation by bending his hand to the ground and then putting it to his lips and forehead,-^— a gesture almost identical with that of the ancient Mexican, who touched the ground with his right hand and put it to his mouth, 2 Captain Cook de- scribes the way of doing reverence to chiefs in the Tonga Is- lands, which was in this wise ; — When a subject approached to do homage, the chief had to hold up his foot behind, as a horse does, and the subject touched the sole with his fingers, thus placing himself, as it were, under the sole of his lord's foot. Every one seemed to have the right of doing reverence in this way when he pleased ; and chiefs got so tired of holding up their feet to be touched, that they would make their escape at the very sight of a loyal subject. 3 Other developments of the idea are found in the objection made to a Polynesian chief 1 Ad. Pictet, ' Origines IndorEuropeennes ; ' Paris, 1859-63, part ii. p. 336. 2 A. v. Humboldt, 'Yues des Cordilleres ; ' Paris, 1810, p. 83. 3 Cook, Third Voyage, 2nd ed. ; London, 1785, vol. i. pp, 267, 409. 48 THE GESTUEE-LANGUAGE. going down into the ship's cabin/ and to images of Buddha being kept there 2 in Siam, namely, that they were insulted by the sailors walking over their heads, and in the custom, also among the Tongans, of sitting down when a chief passed. 3 The ancient Egyptian may be seen in the sculptures abbreviat- ing the gesture of touching the ground by merely putting one hand down to his knee in bowing before a superior. A slight inclination of the body indicates submission or reverence, and becomes at last a mere act of politeness, not involving any sense of inferiority at all. This is brought about by that common habit of civilized man, of pretending to a humility that he does not feel, which leads the Chinese to allude to himself in conversation as "the blockhead " or "the thief," and makes our own high official personages write themselves, Sir, your most obedient humble servant, to persons whom they really consider their inferiors. With regard to the position of the hands in prayer, there seems to have been a confusion of two gestures quite distinct in their origin. The upturned hands seem to expect some de- sired object to be thrown down, while when clasped or set to- gether they seem to ward off an impending blow. It is not unnatural that mercy or protection should be looked upon as a gift, and that the rustic Phidyle should hold out her supine hands to ask that her vines should not feel the pestilent south- west wind ; but the conventionalizing process is carried much further when the hands clasped or with the finger-tips set to- gether can be used, not only to avert an injury, as seems their natural office, but also to ask for a benefit which they cannot even catch hold of when it comes. It is easy enough to give a plausible reason for the custom of taking off the hat as an expression of reverence or polite- ness, by referring it to times when armour was generally worn. To take off the helmet would be equivalent to disarming, and would indicate, in the most practical manner, either submission or peace. The practice of laying aside arms on entering a house appears in a quotation from the 'Boke of Curtayse/ 1 Cook, Third Voyage, vol. i. p. 265. 2 Sir J. Bpwring, ' Siam;' London, 1857, vol. i. p. 125. * Cook, ib. p. 409. THE GESTURE -LANGUAGE. 49 which shows that in the middle ages visitors were expected to leave their weapons with the porter at the outer gate, and when they came to the hall door to take off hoods and gloves. " When thou come tho hall dor to, Do of thy hode, thy gloves also." 1 That women are not required to uncover their heads in church or on a visit, is quite consistent with such an origin of the custom, as their head-dresses were not armour; and the same consistency may be observed in the practice of ladies keeping the glove on in shaking hands, while men very commonly re- move it. When a knight's glove was a steel gauntlet, such a distinction would be reasonable enough. This may indeed be fanciful. The practice of women having the head covered in church belongs to the earliest period of Christianity, and the reasons for adopting it were clearly speci- fied. And the usage of men praying with the head uncovered, may have been an intentional reversal of the practice of cover- ing the head in offering sacrifice among the Romans, and by the Jews in their prayers then and now. It does not seem to have been universal, and is even now not followed in the Cop- tic and Abyssinian churches, in which the Semitic custom of uncovering not the head but the feet is still kept up. This latter ceremony is of high antiquity, and may be plausibly ex- plained as having been done at first merely for cleanliness, as it is now among the Moslems in their baths and houses, as well as in their mosques, that the ground may not be defiled. There are, moreover, a number of practices found in different parts of the world, which throw doubt on these off-hand ex- planations of the customs of uncovering the head and feet, and would almost lead us to include both, as particular cases of a general class of reverential uncoverings of the body. Saul strips off his clothes to prophesy, and lies down so all that day and night. 2 Tertullian speaks against the practice of pray- ing with cloaks laid aside, as the heathen do. 3 There was a well-known custom in Tahiti, of uncovering the body down to the waist in honour of gods or chiefs, and even in the neigh- 1 Wright, ' History of Domestic Manners,' etc. ; London, 1862, p. 141. 2 1 Sam. xix. 24. 3 Tert., De Oratione, xii. E 50 .THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. bourhood of a temple, and on the sacred ground set apart for royalty, with, which may be classed a very odd ceremony, which was performed before Captain Cook on his first visit to the island. 1 The regulations concerning the foiv or turban in the Tonga Islands are very curious, from their partial resemblance to European usages. The turban, Mariner says, may only be worn by warriors going to battle, or at sham fights, or at night-time by chiefs and nobles, or by the common people when at work in the fields or in canoes. On all other occa- sions, to wear a head-dress would be disrespectful, for although no chief should be present, some god might be at hand unseen. If a man were to wear a turban except on these occasions, the first person of superior rank who met him would knock him down, and perhaps even an equal might do it. Even when the turban is allowed to be worn, it must be taken off when a superior approaches, unless in actual battle, but a man who is not much higher in rank will say, ' ' Toogo ho fow," that is, Keep on your turban. 3 During the administration of the ordeal by poison in Mada- gascar, Ellis says that no one is allowed to sit on his long robe, nor to wear the cloth round the waist, and females must keep their shoulders uncovered. 3 A remarkable statement is made by Ibn Batuta, in his account of his journey into the Soudan, in the fourteenth century. He mentions as an evil thing which he has observed in the conduct of the blacks, that women may only come unclothed into the presence of the Sul- tan of Melli, and even the Sultan's own daughters must con- form to the custom. He notices also, that they threw dust and ashes on their heads as a sign of reverence, 4 which makes it appear that the stripping was also a mere act of humiliation. With regard to the practice of uncovering the feet, when we 1 Cook, First Toy. H., vol. ii. pp. 125, 153. Ellis, Polyn. Ees., vol. ii. pp. 171, 352-3. 2 Mariner, ' Tonga Islands ;' vol. i. p. 158. 3 Rev. W. Ellis, Hist, of Madagascar ; London, 1838, vol. i. p. 464. 1 Ibn Batuta, in 'Journal Asiatique,' 4 me Serie, vol. i. p. 221. Waitz, Introd. to Anthropology, E. Tr. ed. by J. F. Collingwood ; part i., London, 1863, p. 301. THE GESTUEE-LANGUAGE. 51 find the Damaras, in South Africa, taking off their sandals before entering a stranger's house, 1 the idea of connecting the practice with the ancient Egyptian custom, or of ascribing it to Moslem influence, at once suggests itself, but the taking off the sandals as a sign of respect seems to have prevailed in Peru. No common Indian, it is said, dared go shod along the Street of the Sun, nor might any one, however great a lord he might be, enter the houses of the sun with shoes on, and even the Inca himself went barefoot into the Temple of the Sun. 2 In this group of reverential uncoverings, the idea that the subject presents himself naked, defenceless, poor, and miser- able before his lord, seems to be dramatically expressed, and this view is borne out by the practice of stripping, or uncover- ing the head and feet, as a sign of mourning, 3 where there can hardly be anything but destitution and misery to be expressed. The lowest class of salutations, which merely aim at giving pleasant bodily sensations, merge into the civilities which we see exchanged among the lower animals. Such are patting, stroking, kissing, pressing noses, blowing, sniffing, and so forth. The often described sign of pleasure or greeting of the Indians of North America, by rubbing each other's arms, breasts, and stomachs, and their own, 4 is similar to the Central African custom, of two men clasping each other's arms with both hands, and rubbing them up and down, 8 and that of stroking one's own face with another's hand or foot, in Poly- nesia ; 6 and the pattings and slappings of the Fuegians belong to the same class. Darwin describes the way in which noses are pressed in New Zealand, with details which have escaped less accurate observers. 7 It is curious that Linnaeus found the salutation by touching noses in the Lapland Alps. People did 1 C. J. Andersson, 'Lake Ngami,' etc., 2nd ed. ; London, 1856, p. 231. 2 Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, 2nd ed. ; London, 1847, toI. i. pp. 97, 78. 3 Micah i. 8. Ezekiel xxiv. 17. Herod, ii. 85. Rev. J. Roberts, ' Oriental Illustrations of the Sacred Scriptures,' 2nd ed. ; London, 1844, p. 492, etc. 4 Charlevoix, vol. iii. p. 16 ; vol. vi. p. 189, etc. 6 Burton, ' Lake Regions of Central Africa ; ' London, 1860, vol. ii. p. 69. 6 Cook, Third Toy., vol. i. p. 179. 7 Darwin, Journal of Res., etc. ; London, 1860, pp. 205, 423. E 2 52 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. not kiss, but put noses together. 1 The Andaman Islanders salute by blowing into another's hand with a cooing murmur. 2 Charlevoix speaks of an Indian tribe on the Gulf of Mexico, who blew into one another's ears ; 3 and Du Chaillu describes himself as having been blown upon in Africa. 4 Natural ex- pressions of joy, such as clapping hands in Africa, 5 and jump- ing up and down in Tierra del Fuego, 6 are made to do duty as signs of friendship or greeting. There are a number of well-known gestures which are hard to explain. Such are various signs of hatred and contempt, such as lolling out the tongue, which is a universal sign, though it is not clear why it should be so, biting the thumb, making the sign of the stork's bill behind another's back (cico- niam facere), and the sign known as " taking a sight," which was as common at the time of Rabelais as it is now. In modern India, as in ancient Rome, only a part of the signs we find described are such as can be set down at once to their proper origin. 7 One of the common gestures in India, especially, has puzzled many Europeans. This is the way of beckoning with the hand to call a person, which looks as though it were the reverse of the movement which we use for the purpose. I have heard, on native authority, that the appa- rent difference consists in the palm being outwards instead ot inwards, but a remark made about the natives of the south of India by Mr. Roberts, who seems to have been an extremely good observer, suggests another explanation : ' ' The way in which the people beckon for a person, is to lift up the right hand to its extreme height, and then bring it down with a sudden sweep to the ground." 8 It is evident that to make a sort of abbreviation of this movement, as by doing it from the wrist or elbow instead of from the shoulder, would be a natural 1 Linnaeus, 'Tour iu Lapland ; ' London, 1811, vol. i. p. 315. 2 Mouat, ' Andaman Islanders ; ' London, 1863, pp. 279-80. 3 Charlevoix, vol. iii. p. 16. 4 Du Chaillu, ' Equatorial Africa ; ' London, 1861, pp. 393, 430. 6 Burton, ' Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 69. 6 Wilkes, TJ. S. Exploring Exp. ; London, 1845, vol. i. p. 127. 7 Plin. xi. 103. Roberts, Oriental Illustr., pp. 87, 90, 285, 293, 461, 475, 491. a Id. p. 396. . . THE GESTUEE-LANGUAGE. 53 sign, and yet would be liable to be taken for our gesture of motioning away. It is possible that something of this kind has led to the following description of the way of beckoning in New Zealand : — " In signals for those some way off to come near the arm is waved in an exactly opposite direction to that adopted by Englishmen for similar purposes, and the natives in giving silent assent to anything, elevate the head and chin in place of nodding acquiescence." 1 The latter sign of ac- quiescence seems as natural as our own, as contrasting with the sideways movement of negation. Of signs used to avert the evil eye, some are connected with the ancient counter-charms, and others are of uncertain mean- ing, such as the very common one represented in old Greek and Roman amulets, the hand closed all but the fore-finger and little finger, which are held out straight. When King Fer- dinand I. of Naples used to appear in public, he might be seen to put his hand from time to time into his pocket. Those who understood his ways knew that he was clenching his fist with the thumb struck out between the first and second fingers, to avert the effect of a glance of the evil eye that some one in the street might have cast on him. Enough has now been said to show that gesture-language is a natural mode of expression common to mankind in general. Moreover, this is true in a different sense to that in which we say that spoken language is common to mankind, including under the word language many hundreds of mutually unintel- ligible tongues, for the gesture -language is essentially one and the same in all times and all countries. It is true that the signs used in different places, and by different persons, are only partially the same ; but it must be remembered that the same idea may be expressed in signs in very many ways, and that it is not necessary that all should choose the same. How the choice of gesture- signs is influenced by education and habit of life is well shown by a story told somewhere of a boy, himself deaf-and-dumb, who paid a visit to a Deaf and Dumb Asylum. When he was gone, the inmates expressed to the 1 A. S. Thomson, « The Story of New Zealand ; ' London, 1859, vol. i. p. 209. See Cook, First Toy. H., vol. ii. p. 311. 54 THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. master their disgust at his ways. He talked an ugly language, they said ; when he 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 under- stood 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." 1 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 ob- serving 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. 1 Dr. Orpen, ' The Contrast,' p. 177> 55 CHAPTER IV. GESTtIKE -LANGUAGE AND WOKD -LANGUAGE. We know very little about the origin of language, but the subject has so great a charm for the human mind that the want of evidence has not prevented the growth of theory after theory; and all sorts of men, with all sorts of qualifications, have solved the problem, each in his own fashion. We may read, for instance, Dante's treatise on the vulgar tongue, and wonder, not that, as he lived in mediaeval times, his argument is but a mediaeval argument, but that in the f Paradiso/ seem- ingly on the strength of some quite futile piece of evidence, he should have made Adam enunciate a notion which even in this nineteenth century has hardly got fairly hold of the popular mind, namely, that there is no primitive language of man to be found existing on earth. " La lingua ch' io parlai fa tutta spenta Innanzi che all' ovra inconsumabile Fosse la gente di Nembrotte attenta. Che nullo affetto mai raziocinabile Per lo piacere uman che rinnovella, Seguendo '1 cielo, sempre fu durabile. Opera naturale e ch' uom favella : Ma cosi, o cosi, natura lascia Poi fare a voi secondo che v' abbella. Pria ch' io scendessi all' infernale ambascia EL b* appellava in terra il sommo Bene Onde vien la letizia che mi fascia : ELI si chiamo poi : e cio conviene : Che 1' uso de' mortali e come fronda In ramo, che sen va, ed altra viene." 56 GESTUKE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. In Mr. Pollock's translation : — " The language, which I spoke, was quite worn out Before unto the work impossible The race of Nimrod had their labour turned ; For no production of the intellect Which is renewed at pleasure of mankind, Following the sky, was durable for aye. It is a natural thing that man should speak ; But whether this or that way, nature leaves To your election, as it pleases you. Ere I descended on the infernal road, Upon earth, EL was called the Highest Good, From whom the enjoyment flows that me surrounds ; And was called ELI after ; as was meet : For mortal usages are like a leaf, Upon a bough, which goes, and others come." Since Dante's time, how many men of genius have set the whole power of their minds against the problem, and to how little purpose. Steinthal's masterly summary of these specu- lations in his ' Origin of Language \ is quite melancholy read- ing. It may indeed be brought forward as evidence to prove something that matters far more to us than the early history of language, that it is of as little use to be a good reasoner when there are no facts to reason upon, as it is to be a good bricklayer when there are no bricks to build with. At the root of the problem of the origin of language lies the question, why certain words were originally used to represent certain ideas, or mental conditions, or whatever we may call them. The word may have been used for the idea because it had an evident fitness to be used rather than another word, or because some association of ideas, which we cannot now trace, may have led to its choice. That the selection of words to express ideas was ever purely arbitrary, that is to say, such that it would have been consistent with its principle to ex- change any two words as we may exchange algebraic symbols, or to shake up a number of words in a bag and re-distribute them at random among the ideas they represented, is a suppo- sition opposed to such knowledge as we have of the formation of language. And not in language only, but in the study of GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 57 the whole range of art and belief among mankind, the prin- ciple is continually coming more and more clearly into view, that man has not only a definite reason, but very commonly an assignable one, for everything that he does and believes. In the only departments of language of whose origin we have any clear notion, as for instance in the class of pure imi- tative words such as " cuckoo" "peewit" and the like, the con- nection between word and idea is not only real but evident. It is true that different imitative words may be used for the same sound, as for instance the tick of a clock is called also pick in Germany j but both these words have an evident resem- blance to the unwriteable sound that a clock really makes. So the Tahitian word for the crowing of cocks, aaoa, might be brought over as a rival to " cock-a-doodle-doo ! M There is, moreover, a class of words of undetermined extent, which seem to have been either chosen in some measure with a view to the fitness of their sound to represent their sense, or actually modified by a reflection of sound into sense. Some such pro- cess seems to have made the distinction between to crash, to crush, to crunch, and to craunch, and to have differenced to flip, to flap, to flop and to flump, out of a common root. Some of these words must be looked for in dictionaries of u pro- ,■ vincialisms," but they are none the less English for that. In pure interjections, such as oh ! ah ! the connection between the actual pronunciation and the idea which is to be conveyed is perceptible enough, though it is hardly more possible to define it than it is to convey in writing their innumerable mo- dulations of sound and sense. But if there was a living connection between word and idea outside the range of these classes of words, it seems dead now. We might just as well use " inhabitable " in the French sense as in that of modern English. In fact Shakspeare and other writers do so, as where Norfolk says in ' Richard the Second/ " Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps, Or any other ground inhabitable." It makes no practical difference to the world at large, that our word to " rise " belongs to the same root as Old German risan, to fall, French arriser, to let fall, whichever of the two 58 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. meanings may have come first, nor that black, blanc, bleich, to bleach, to blacken, Anglo-Saxon blaze, blac = black, &Zac =pale, white, come so nearly together in sonnd. It has been plau- sibly conjectured that the reversal of the meaning of to ' ' rise " may have happened through a preposition being prefixed to change the sense, and dropping off again, leaving the word with its altered meaning, 1 while if black is related to Ger- man blaken, to burn, and has the sense of " charred, burnt to a coal," and blanc has that of shining, 3 a common origin may possibly be forthcoming for both sets among the family of words, which includes blaze, fulgeo, flagro, (frXeyco, \6^, San- skrit bhrdg, and so forth. But explanations of this kind have no bearing on the practical use of such words by mankind at large, who take what is given them and ask no questions. Indeed, however much such a notion may vex the souls of etymologists, there is a great deal to be said for the view that much of the accuracy of our modern languages is due to their having so far " lost consciousness M of the derivation of their words, which thus become like counters or algebraic symbols, good to represent just what they are set down to mean. Ar- chaeology is a very interesting and instructive study, but when \ it comes to exact argument, it may be that the distinctness of our apprehension of what a word means, is not always in- creased by a misty recollection hovering about it in our minds, that it or its family once meant something else. For such pur- poses, what is required is not so much a knowledge of etymo- logy, as accurate definition, and the practice of checking words by realizing the things and actions they are used to denote. It is as bearing on the question of the relation between idea and word that the study of the gesture-language is of particu- lar interest. We have in it a method of human utterance independent of speech, and carried on through a different medium, in which, as has been said, the connection between idea and sign has hardly ever been broken, or even lost sight of for a moment. The gesture-language is in fact a system of 1 Jacob Grimm, ' Gescbichte der Deutschen Sprache ;' Leipzig, 1848, p. 664. 2 See J. and W. Grimm, ' Deutsches Worterbuch,' s. tv. black, blaken, blick, etc. Diez, Wdrterb., s.v. bianco. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD -LANGUAGE. 59 utterance to which the description of the primseval language in the Chinese myth may be applied ; " Suy-jin first gave names to plants and animals, and these names were so expres- sive, that by the name of a thing it was known what it was." 1 To speak first of the comparison of gesture-signs with words, it has been already observed that the gesture-language uses two different processes. It brings objects and actions bodily into the conversation, by pointing to them or looking at them, and it also suggests by imitation of actions, or by " pic- tures in the air," and these two processes may be used sepa- rately or combined. This division may be clumsy and in some cases inaccurate, but it is the best I have succeeded in making. I will now examine more closely the first division, in which objects are brought directly before the mind. When Mr. Lemuel Gulliver visited the school of languages in Lagado, he was made acquainted with a scheme for im- proving language by abolishing all words whatsoever. Words being only names for things, people were to carry the things themselves about, instead of wasting their breath in talking about them. The learned adopted the scheme, and sages might be seen in the streets bending under their heavy sacks of materials for conversation, or unpacking their loads for a talk. This was found somewhat troublesome. " But for short conversations, a man may carry implements in his pockets, and under his arms, enough to supply him ; and in his house, he cannot be at a loss. Therefore the room where the com- pany meet who practise this art, is full of all things, ready at hand, requisite to furnish matter for this kind of artificial converse." The traveller records that this plan did not come into ge- neral use, owing to the ignorant opposition of the women and the common people, who threatened to raise a rebellion if they were not allowed to speak with their tongues after the manner of their forefathers. But this system of talking by objects is in sober earnest an important part of the gesture-language, and in its early development among the deaf-and-dumb, per- haps the most important. Is there then anything in spoken 1 Goguet, 'De l'Origine des Lois,' etc. ; Paris, 1758, vol. iii. p. 322. 60 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. language that can be compared with the gestures by which this process is performed ? Quintilian incidentally answers the question. " As for the hands indeed, without which action would be maimed and feeble, one can hardly say how many movements they have, when they almost follow the whole stock of words j for the other members help the speaker, but they, I may almost say, themselves speak." . . . " Do they not in 'pointing out 'places and persons, fulfil the purpose of adverbs and pronouns ? so that in so great a diversity of tongues among all peoples and nations this seems to me the common language of all mankind ? " — u Manus vero, sine quibus trunca esset actio ac debilis, vix dici potest, quot motus habeant, quum paene ipsam verborum copiam persequantur ; nam cseterae partes loquentem adjuvant, hge, prope est ut dicam, ipsa3 lo- quuntur. . . . Non in demonstrandis locis ac personis adverbio- rmn atque pronominum obtinent vicem ? ut in tanta per omnes gentes nationesque linguge diversitate hie mihi omnium homi- num communis sermo videatur." 1 Where a man stands is to him the centre of the universe, and he refers the position of any object to himself, as before or behind him, above or below him, and so on ; or he makes his fore-linger issue, as it were, as a radius from this imaginary centre, and, pointing in any direction into space, says that the thing he points out is there. He defines the position of an ob- ject somewhat as it is done in Analytical Geometry, using either a radius vector, to which the demonstrative pronoun may partly be compared, or referring it to three axes, as, in front or be- hind, to the right or left, above or below. His body, however, not being a point, but a structure of considerable size, he often confuses his terms, as when he uses here for some spot only comparatively near him, instead of making it come towards the same imaginary centre whence there started. He can in thought shift his centre of co-ordinates and the position of his 1 Quint., Inst. Orat., lib. xi. 3, 85, seqq. " Luther f uhrt an das ist mein leib und bemerkt dabei folgendes, c das ist ein pronomen und lautet der buchstab a drinnen stark und lang, als ware es gesehrieben also, dahas, wie ein schwabisch oder algau- wisch daas lautet, und wer es horet, dem ist als stehe ein finger dabei der darauf zeige'" (Grimm, D. W., r. v. "der"). GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 61 axes, and imagining himself in the place of another person, or even of an inanimate object, can describe the position of him- self or anything else with respect to them. Movement and direction come before his mind as a real or imaginary going from one place to another, and such movement gives him the idea of time which the deaf-and-dumb man expresses by draw- ing a line with his finger along his arm from one point to another, and the speaker by a similar adaptation of prepositions or adverbs of place. I do not wish to venture below the surface of this difficult subject, for an elaborate examination of which I would espe- cially refer to the researches of Professor Pott, of Halle. 1 But it may be worth while to call attention to an apparent resem- blance of two divisions of the root-words of our Aryan lan- guages to the two great classes of gesture-signs. Professor Max Muller divides the Sanskrit root-forms into two classes, the pre- dicative roots, such as to shine, to extend, and so forth ; and the demonstrative roots, " a small class of independent radicals, not predicative in the usual sense of the word, but simply pointing, simply expressive of existence under certain more or less defi- nite, local or temporal prescriptions." 2 If we take from among the examples given, here, there, this, that, thou, he, as types, we have a division of the elements of the Sanskrit language to which a division of the signs of the deaf-mute into predicative and demonstrative would at least roughly correspond. Many centuries ago the Indian grammarians made desperate efforts to bring pronouns and verbs, as the Germans say, " under one hat." They deduced the demonstrative ta from tan, to stretch, and the relative ya from yag, to worship. Unity is pleasant to mankind, who are often ready to sacrifice things of more con- sequence than etymology for it. But perhaps, after all, the world may not have been constructed for the purpose of pro- viding for the human mind just what it is pleased to ask for. Of course, any full comparison of speech and the gesture- language would have to go into the hard problem of the rela- tion of prepositions to adverbs and pronouns on the one hand, 1 Pott, ■ Etymologische Forschungen,' new ed.; Lemgo and Detmold, 1859, etc., vol. i. 8 Muller, Lectures, 3rd ed. 5 London, 1862, p. 272. 62 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WOKD-LANGUAGE. and to verb-roots on the other. As to this matter, I can only- say that the deaf-mute puts his right fore-finger into the palm of his left hand to say "in," takes it out again to say "out/' puts his right hand above or below his left to say " above" or " below," etc., signs which are merely imitative and sugges- tive. But the gestures with which he shows that anything is " above me," ' ' behind me," and so on, are of a more direct character, and are rather demonstrative than predicative. The class of imitative and suggestive signs in the gesture- language corresponds in some measure with the Chinese words which are neither verbs, substantives, adjectives, nor adverbs, but answer the purpose of all of them, as, for instance, ta, meaning great, greatness, to make great, to be great, greatly j 1 or they may be compared with what Sanskrit roots would be if they were used as they stand in the dictionaries, without any inflections. In the gesture-language there seems no dis- tinction between the adjective, the adverb which belongs to it, the substantive, and the verb. To say, for instance, " The pear is green," the deaf-and-dumb child first eats an imaginary pear, and then using the back of the flat left hand as a ground, he makes the fingers of the right hand grow up on the edge of it like blades of gras. We might translate these signs as "pear-grass;" but they have quite as good a right to be classed as verbs, for they are signs of eating in a peculiar way, and growing. It is not necessary to have recourse to Asiatic languages for analogies of this kind with the gesture-language. The sub- stantive-adjective is common enough in English, and indeed in most other languages. In such compounds as chestnut- horse, spoon -bill , iron-stone, feather-grass, we have the sub- stantive put to express a quality which distinguishes it. Our * S own language, which has gone so far towards assimilating itself to the Chinese by dropping inflection and making syntax do its work, has developed to a great extent a concretism which is like that of the Chinese, who makes one word do duty for " stick" and to " beat with a stick," or of the deaf- mute, whose sign for "butter" or the act of "buttering" is 1 Endlicher, Chin. Gramm. ; Vienna, ] 845, p. 168. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD -LANGUAGE. 63 the same, the imitation of spreading with his finger on the palm of his hand. To butter bread, to cudgel a man, to oil machinery, to pepper a dish, and scores of such expressions, involve action and instrument in one word, and that word a substantive treated as the root or crude form of a verb. Such expressions are concretisms, picture -words, gesture- words, as much as the deaf-and-dumb man's one sign for " butter" and " buttering." To separate these words, and to say that there is one butter, a noun, and another butter, a verb, may be con- venient for the dictionary ; but to pretend that there is a real distinction between the words is a mere grammatical juggle, like saying that the noun man has a nominative case man, and an objective case which is also man, and much of the rest of the curious system of putting new wine into old bottles, and stretching the organism of a live language upon a dead frame- work, which is commonly taught as English Grammar. The reference of substantives to a verb-root in the Aryan languages and elsewhere is thoroughly in harmony with the spirit of the gesture-language. Thus, the horse is the neigher ; stone is what stands, is stable; water is that which waves, undulates ; the mouse is the stealer ; an age is what goes on; the oar is what makes to go ; the serpent is the creeper ; and so on ; that is to say, the etymologies of these words lead us back to the actions of neighing, standing, waving, stealing, etc. Now, the deaf-and-dumb Kruse tells us that even to the mute who has no means of communication but signs, " the bird is what flies, the fish what swims, the plant what sprouts out of the earth." 1 It may be said that action, and form resulting from action, form the staple of that part of the gesture-language which occupies itself with suggesting to the mind that which it does not bring bodily before it. But, though there is so much similarity of principle in the formation of gesture- signs and words, there is no general correspondence in the particular idea chosen to name an object by in the two kinds of utterance. In the second place, with regard to the syntax of the gesture-language, it is hardly possible to compare it with 1 Kruse, p. 53. 64 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. that of inflected languages such as Latin, which can alter the form of words to express their relation to one another. With Chinese and some other languages of Eastern Asia, and with English and French, etc., where they have thrown off inflection, it may be roughly compared, though all these languages use at least grammatical particles which have nothing correspond- ing to them in the gesture-language. Now, it is remarkable to what an extent Chinese and English agree in doing just what the gesture-language does not. Both put the attribute before the subject, jpe ma, '" white horse f 9 shing jin, " holy man;" both put the action before the object, ngo ta ni, "I strike thee," tien sang iu, " heaven destroys me." The fre- quent practice of the gesture-language in putting the modifier after the modified is opposed both to Chinese and English construction, as these examples show; and even where the antagonism is not so absolute, and the deaf-mute says in signs u boy ball threw," as well as " ball threw boy," there is still an important difference. e< It seems," says Steinthal, " that the speech of the Chinese hastens toward the conclusion, and brings the end prominently forward. In the described position of the three relations of speech the more important member stands last." 1 A more absolute contradiction of the leading principle of the gesture-syntax could hardly have been formu- lated in words. The theory that the gesture-language was the original lan- guage of man, and that speech came afterwards, has been already mentioned. We have no foundation to build such a vf theory upon, but there are several questions bearing upon the matter which are well worth examining. Before doing so, however, it will be well to look a little more closely into the claim of the gesture-language to be considered as a means of utterance independent of speech. In the first place, an absolute separation between the two things is not to be found within the range of our experience. Though the deaf-mute may not speak himself, yet the most of what he knows, he only knows by means of speech, for he 1 Steinthal, { Charakteristik der hauptsachlichsten Typen desSprachbauesj' Ber- lin, 1860, p. 114, etc. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 65 learns from the gestures of his parents and companions what they learnt through words. We speak conventionally of the uneducated deaf-and-dumb, but every deaf-and-dumb child is educated more or less by living among those who speak, and this education begins in the cradle. And on the other hand, no child attains to speech independently of the gesture-lan- guage, for it is in great measure by means of such gestures as pointing, nodding, and so forth, that language is first taught. In old times, when the mental capacity of the deaf-and-dumb was little known, it was thought by the Greeks that they were incapable of education, since hearing, the sense of instruction, was wanting to them. Quite consistent with this notion is the confusion which runs through language between mental stupidity, and deafness, dumbness, and even blindness. Sur- dus means " deaf," and also " stupid ;" a hollow nut is a deaf- nut, taube Nuss ; /ccocfros means dumb, deaf, stupid. u Speech- less " (infans, vqirios) being a natural term for a child, in a similar way " dumb n (tump, tumb) becomes in Old German a common word for young, giddy, thoughtless, till at last " dumb and wise n come to mean nothing more than " lads and grown men," as where in the tournament many a shock is heard of wise and of dumb, and the breaking of the lances sounds up towards the sky, " Von when und von tumben man horte manegen stoz, Da der schefte brechen gein der koehe doz." ' Even Kant is to be found committing himself to the opinion, so amazing, one would think, to anybody who has ever been inside a deaf-and-dumb Institution, that a born mute can never attain to more than something analogous to reason (einem Analogon der Vernunft) ? The evidence of teachers of the deaf-and-dumb goes to prove, that in their untaught state, or at least with only such small teaching as they get from the signs of their relatives and friends, their thought is very limited, but still it is human thought, while when they have been regularly instructed and taught to read and write, their minds may be developed up to 1 Nibel. N6t, 37. 2 Kant, 'Anthropologic ;' Konigsberg, 1798, p. 49. Schmalz, p. 46. F 66 GESTUEE-LANGUAGE AND W0ED-LANGUAGE. about the average cultivation of those who have had the power of speech from childhood. Even in a low state of education, the deaf-mute seems to conceive general ideas, for when he invents a sign for anything, he applies it to all other things of the same class, and he can also form abstract ideas in a cer- tain way, or at least he knows that there is a quality in which snow and milk agree, and he can go on adding other white things, such as the moon and whitewash, to his list. He can form a proposition, for he can make us understand, and we can make him understand, that H this man is old, that man is young." Nor does he seem incapable of reasoning in some- thing like a syllogism, even when he has no means of commu- nication but the gesture-language, and certainly as soon as he has learnt to read that c ' All men are mortal, John is a man, therefore John is mortal," he will show by every means of illustration in his power, that he fully comprehends the argu- ment. There is detailed evidence on record as to the state of mind of the deaf-and-dumb who have had no education but what comes with mere living among speaking people. Thus Mas- sieu, the Abbe Sicard's celebrated pupil, gave an account of what he could remember of his untaught state. He loved his father and mother much, and made himself understood by them in signs. There were six deaf-and-dumb children in the family, three boys and three girls. u I stayed," he said, " at my home till I was thirteen years and nine months old, and never had any instruction; I had darkness for the letters (j'avois tenebres pour les lettres). I expressed my ideas by manual signs or gesture. The signs which I used then, to express my ideas to my relatives and my brothers and sisters, were very different from those of the educated deaf-and-dumb. Strangers never understood us when we expressed our ideas to them by signs, but the neighbours understood us." He noticed oxen, horses, vegetables, houses, and so forth, and remembered them when he had seen them. He wanted to learn to read and write, and to go to school with the other boys and girls, but was not allowed to ; so he went to the school and asked by signs to be taught to read and write, but GESTURE -LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 67 * the master refused harshly, and turned him out of the school. His father made him kneel at prayers with the others, and he imitated the joining of their hands and the movement of their lips, but thought (as other deaf-and-dumb children have done), that they were worshipping the sky. " I knew the numbers," he said, "before my instruction, my fingers had taught me them. I did not know the figures ; I counted on my fingers, and when the number was over ten, I made notches in a piece of wood." When he was asked what he used to think people were doing when they looked at one another and moved their lips, he replied that he thought they were expressing ideas, and in answer to the inquiry why he thought so, he said he remembered people speaking about him to his father, and then his father threatened to have him punished. 1 Kruse tells a very curious story of an untaught deaf-and- dumb boy. He was found by the police wandering about Prague, in 1805. He could not make himself understood, and they could find out nothing about him, so they sent him to the deaf-and-dumb Institution, where he was taught. When he had been sufficiently educated to enable him to give accurate answers to questions put to him, he gave an account of what he remembered of his life previously to his coming to the In- stitution. His father, he said, had a mill, and of this mill, the furniture of the house, and the country round it, he gave a precise description. He gave a circumstantial account of his life there, how his mother and sister died, his father married again, his step-mother ill-treated him, and he ran away. He did not know his own name, nor what the mill was called, but he knew it lay away from Prague towards the morning. On inquiry being made, the boy's statement was confirmed. The police found his home, gave him his name, and secured his inheritance for him. 2 Even Laura Bridgman, who was blind as well as deaf-and- dumb, expressed her feelings by the signs we all use, though she had never seen them made, and could not tell that the by- standers could observe them. She would stamp with delight, and shudder at the idea of a cold bath. When astonished, she 1 Sicard, ' Theorie,' vol. ii. p. G32, etc. 2 Kruse, p. 54. p2 68 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD- LANGUAGE. would protrude her lips, and hold up her hands with fingers wide spread out, and she might be seen " biting her lips with an upward contraction of the facial muscles when roguishly lis- tening at the account of some ludicrous mishap, precisely as lively persons among us would do." While speaking of a person, she would point to the spot where he had been sitting when she last conversed with him, and where she still believed him to be. 1 Though, however, the deaf-and-dumb prove clearly to us that a man may have human thought without being able to speak, they by no means prove that he can think without any means of physical expression. Their evidence tends the other way. We may read with profit an eloquent passage on this subject by a German professor, as, transcendental as it is, it is put in such clear terms, that we may almost think we under- stand it. " Herein lies the necessity of utterance, the representation of thought. Thought is not even present to the thinker, till he has set it forth out of himself. Man, as an individual en- dowed with sense and with mind, first attains to thought, and at the same time to the comprehension of himself, in setting forth out of himself the contents of his mind, and in this his free production, he comes to the knowledge of himself, his thinking 1 I.' He comes first to himself in uttering himself." 2 This view is not contradicted, but to some extent supported, by what we know of the earliest dawnings of thought among the deaf-and-dumb. But we must take the word " utterance " in its larger sense, to include not speech alone, as Heyse seems to do, but all ways by which man can express his thoughts. Man is essentially, what the derivation of his name among our Aryan race imports, not " the speaker," but he who thinks, he who means. The deaf-and-dumb Kruse's opinion as to the development of thought among his own class, by and together with gesture- signs, has been already quoted ; how the qualities which make 1 Lieber, On the Yocal Sounds of Laura Bridgman, in Smithsonian Contrib., vol. ii. ; Washington, 1851. 2 Heyse, • System der Sprachwissenschaft ; ' Berlin, 1856, p. 39. GESTUEE -LANGUAGE AND WORD- LANGUAGE. 69 a distinction to him between one thing and another, become, when he imitates objects and actions in the air with hands, fingers, and gestures, suitable signs, which serve him as a means of fixing ideas in his mind, and recalling them to his memory, and that thus he makes himself signs, which, scanty and imperfect as they may be, yet serve to open a way for thought, and these thoughts and signs develope themselves further and further. Very similar is Professor SteinthaPs opinion, which, to some extent, agrees with the theory of the manifestation of the Ego adopted by Heyse, but gives a larger definition to " utterance." Man, ' ( even when he has no per- ception of sound, can yet manifest to himself through any other sense that which is contained in his sensible certainty, can set forth an object out of himself, and separate himself, his Ego, as something permanent and universal, from that which is transitory and particular, even if he does not at once compre- hend this universal something in the form of the Ego." The same writer, after asserting that mind and speech are deve- loped together ; that the mind does not originally make speech, but that it is speech ; that language shapes itself in mind, or mind shapes itself in language, goes on to qualify these asser- tions. " We recognize the power of language not so much in the sound, as in the inward process. But it is as certain that this goes forward in the deaf-mute, as it is that he is a human being, flesh of human flesh and spirit of infinite spirit. But it goes forward in him in a somewhat different form," etc. 1 Whether the human mind is capable of exercising at all any of its peculiarly human functions without any means of utter- ance, or not, we shall all admit that it could have gone but very little way, could only just have passed the line which divides beast from man. All experience concurs to prove, that the mental powers and the s*tock of ideas of those human beings who have but imperfect means of utterance, are imper- fect and scanty in proportion to those means. The manner in which we can see such persons accompanying their thought with the utterance which is most convenient to them, shows to how great a degree thought is " talking to oneself." The 1 Steinthal, Spr. der T., pp. 907, 909. 70 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. deaf-and-dumb gesticulate as they think. Laura Bridgman's fingers worked, making the initial movements for letters of the finger-alphabet, not only during her waking thought, but even in her dreams. Spoken language, though by no means the exclusive medium of thought and expression, is undoubtedly the best. In default of this, it is only by means of a substitute for it, namely, alphabetic writing, that we succeed in giving more than a very low development to the minds of the deaf-and-dumb ; and they of course connect the idea directly with the written word, not as we do, the writing with the sound, and then the sound with the idea. When they think in writing, as they often do, the image of the written words which correspond to their ideas, must rise up before them in the " mind's eye." The Germans, who are strong advocates of the system of teaching the deaf-and- dumb to articulate, believe that the power of connecting ideas with actual or imaginary movements of the organs of speech, gives an enormous increase of mental power, which I am how- ever inclined to think is a good deal exaggerated. Heinicke gives a description of the results of his teaching his pupils to articulate, their delight at being able to communicate their ideas in this new way, and the increased intelligence which appeared in the expression of their faces. As soon, he says, as the born-mute is sufficiently taught to enable him to in- crease his stock of ideas by the power of naming them, he begins to talk aloud in his sleep, and when this happens, it shows that the power of thinking in words has taken root. 1 Heinicke was, however, an enthusiast for his system of teach- ing, and in practice, it is I believe generally found, that arti- culation does not displace gesture-signs and written language as a medium of thought; and certainly, the deaf-and-dumb who can speak, very much prefer the sign language for prac- tical use among themselves. Instructors of the deaf-and-dumb in England and America seem to have generally decided, that with ordinary pupils, articulation is not worth the time and trouble it costs, and they use it but little. Of course, no one doubts that it is desirable that the children should be taught 1 Heinicke, p. 103, etc. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 71 to speak, and to read from the lips, especially when the deaf- ness is not total ; but the question is, whether it is worth while to devote a large proportion of the few years' instruction which is given to the poorer pupils, to this object. It is asserted in Germany, that a want of the natural use of the lungs promotes the tendency to consumption, which is very common among the deaf-and-dumb, and that teaching them to articulate tends to counteract this. This sounds probable enough, though I do not find, even in Schmalz, any sufficient evidence to prove it, but at any rate, there is no doubt that the deaf-and-dumb should be encouraged to use their lungs in shouting at their play, as they naturally do. It is quite clear that the loss of the powers of hearing and speech is a loss to the mind which no substitute can fully re- place. Children who have learnt to speak and afterwards be- come deaf, lose the power of thinking in inward language, and become to all intents and purposes the same as those who could never hear at all, unless great pains are taken to keep up and increase their knowledge by other means. H And thus even those who become hard of hearing at an age when they can already speak a little, by little and little lose all that they have learnt. Their voices lose all cheerfulness and euphony, every day wipes a word out of the memory, and with it the idea of which it was the sign." 1 Spoken words appear to be, in the minds of the deaf-mutes who have been artificially taught to speak, merely combined movements of the throat and other vocal organs, and the initial movement made by them in calling words to mind has been compared to a tickling in the throat. People wanting a sense often imagine to themselves a resemblance between it and one of the senses which they possess. The old saying of the blind man, that he thought scarlet was like the sound of a trumpet, is somewhat like a remark made by Kruse, that though he is " stock-deaf," he has a bodily feeling of music, and different instruments have different effects upon him. Musical tones seem to his perception to have much analogy with colours. The sound of the trumpet is yellow to him, that of the drum 1 Schmalz, pp. 2, 32. 72 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. red ; while the music of the organ is green, and of the bass- viol blue, and so on. Such comparisons are, indeed, not con- fined to those whose senses are incomplete. Language shows clearly that men in general have a strong feeling of such ana- logies among the impressions of the different senses. Expres- sions such as i( schreiend roth," and the use of ' ' loud," as ap- plied to colours and patterns, are superficial examples of ana- logies which have their roots very deep in the human mind. It is a very notable fact bearing upon the problem of the Origin of Language, that even born-mutes, who never heard a word spoken, do of their own accord and without any teaching make vocal sounds more or less articulate, to which they attach a definite meaning, and which, when once made, they go on using afterwards in the same unvarying sense. Though these sounds are often capable of being written down more or less accurately with our ordinary alphabets, their effect on those who make them can, of course, have nothing to do with the sense of hearing, but must consist only in particular ways of breathing, combined with particular positions of the vocal organs. Teuscher, a deaf-mute, whose mind was developed by educa- tion to a remarkable degree, has recorded that, in his unedu- cated state, he had already discovered the sounds which were inwardly blended with his sensations (innig verschmolzen mit meiner Empfindungsweise.) So, as a child, he had affixed a special sound to persons he loved, his parents, brothers and sisters, to animals, and things for which he had no sign (as water) ; and called any person he wished with one unaltered voice. 1 Heinicke gives some remarkable evidence, which we may, I think, take as given in entire good faith, though the reservation should be made, that through his strong par- tiality for articulation as a means of educating the deaf-and- dumb, he may have given a definiteness to these sounds in writing them down which they did not really possess. The following are some of his remarks: — "All mutes disco- ver words for themselves for different things. Among over fifty whom I have partly instructed or been acquainted with, 1 Steinthal, Spr. der T., p. 917. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 73 there was not one who had not uttered at least a few spoken names, which he had discovered himself, and some were very- clear and well defined. I had under my instruction a born deaf-mute, nineteen years old, who had previously invented many writeable words for things, some three, four, and six syllables long/' For instance, he called to eat "mumm," to drink " schipp," a child " tutten," a dog " beyer," money u patten/' He had a neighbour who was a grocer, and him he called " patt" [a name, no doubt, connected with his name for money, for buying and selling ( is indicated by the deaf and dumb by the action of counting out coin]. The grocer's son he called by a simple combination u pattutten." For the two first numerals, he had words — 1, " ga;" 2, "schuppatter." In his language, " riecke" meant " I will not f* and when they wanted to force him to do anything, he would cry " naffet riecke Benito." An exclamation which he used was "heschbefa," in the sense of God forbid. 1 Some of these sounds, as " mumm" and " schipp," for eat- ing and drinking, and perhaps " beyer," for the dog, are mere vocalizations of the movements of the mouth, which the deaf- and-dumb make in imitating the actions of eating, drinking, and barking, in their gesture-language. Besides, it is a com- mon thing for even the untaught deaf-and-dumb to speak and understand a few words of the language spoken by their asso- ciates. Though they cannot hear them, they imitate the mo- tions of the lips and teeth of those who speak, and thus make a tolerable imitation of words containing labial and dental let- ters, though the gutturals, being made quite out of sight, can only be imparted to them by proper teaching, and then only with difficulty and imperfectly. It is scarcely necessary to say that when the deaf-and-dumb are taught to speak in articulate language, this is done merely by developing and systematizing the lip-imitation which is natural to them. As instances of the power which deaf-mutes have of learning words by sight with- out any regular teaching, may be given the cases mentioned by Schmalz of children born stone-deaf, who learnt in this way to say "papa," "mamma," " muhme" (cousin), " puppe" 1 Heinicke, p. 137, etc. 74 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. (doll), "bitte" (please). 1 All the sounds in these words are such as deaf persons may imitate by sight. An extraordinary story of this kind is told by Eschwege, who was a scientific traveller of high standing, and upon whom the responsibility for the truth of the narrative must rest. The scene is laid in a place in the interior of Brazil, where he rested on a journey, and his account is as follows : — " I was occupied the rest of the day in quail-hunting, and in making philoso- phical observations on a deaf-and-dumb idiot negro boy about thirteen years old, with water on the brain, and upon whom nothing made any impression except the crowing of a cock, whose voice he could imitate to the life. Just as people teach the deaf-and-dumb to speak, so this beast-man, by observing and imitating the movements of the neck and tongue of the cock, had in time learnt to crow, and this seemed the only pleasure he had beyond the satisfaction of his natural wants. He lay most part of the day stark naked on the ground, and crowed as if for a wager against the cock." 2 Returning to the list of words given by Heinicke, it does not seem easy to set down any of them as lip -imitations, unless it be "heschbefa" " Gott bewahre!" in which befa may be an imitation of bewahre. We have, then, left several articulate sounds, such as " patten," money, u tutten," child, etc., which seem to have been used as real words, but of which it seems impossible to say why the dumb lad selected them to bear the meanings which he gave them. The vocal sounds used by Laura Bridgman are of great interest from the fact that, being blind as well as deaf-and- dumb, she could not even have imitated words by seeing them made. Yet she would utter sounds, as u ho-o-pli-ph " for wonder, and a short of chuckling or grunting as an expression of satisfaction. When she did not like to be touched, she would say, // Her teachers used to restrain her from making inarticulate sounds, but she felt a great desire to make them, and would sometimes shut herself up and " indulge herself in a surfeit of sounds." But this vocal faculty of hers was chiefly 1 Schmalz, p. 216 a. 2 Eschwege, 'Brasilien;' Brunswick, 1830, parti, p. 59. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 75 exercised in giving what may be called name-sounds to per- sons whom she knew, and which she would make when the persons to whom she had given them came near her, or when she wanted to find them, or even when she was thinking of them. She had made as many as fifty or sixty of these name- sounds, some of which have been written down, as foo, too, pa, fift Vtyt t s > ^ u * man y °f them were not capable of being written down even approximately. Even if Laura's vocal sounds are not classed as real words, a distinction between the articulate sounds used by the deaf- and-dumb for child, water, eating, and drinking, etc., and the words of ordinary language, could not easily be made, whether the deaf-mutes invented these sounds or imitated them from the lips of others. To go upon the broadest ground, the mere fact that teachers can take children who have no means of uttering their thoughts but the gesture -language, and teach them to articulate words, to recognize them by sight when uttered by others, to write them, and to understand them as equivalents for their own gestures, is sufficient to bridge over the gulf which lies between the gesture-language and, at least, a rudimentary form of word-language. These two kinds of utterance are capable of being translated with more or less exactness into one another-; and it seems more likely than not that there may be a similarity between the process by which the human mind first uttered itself in speech, and that by which the same mind still utters itself in gestures. To turn to another subject. We have no evidence of man ever having lived in society without the use of spoken language; but there are some myths of such races, and, moreover, state- ments have been made by modern writers of eminence as to an intermediate state between gesture -language and word- language, which deserve careful examination. In Ethiopia, across the desert, says the geographer Pom- ponius Mela, there dwell dumb people, and such as use gestures instead of language ; others, whose tongues give no sound ; others, who have no tongues (muti populi, et quibus pro eloquio nutus est ; alii sine sono linguse ; alii sine Unguis, etc.) ] . Pliny 1 Mela, iii. 9. 76 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WOED-LANGUAGE. gives much the same account. Some of these Ethiopian tribes are said to have no noses, some no upper lips, some no tongues. Some have for their language nods and gestures (quibusdam pro sermone nutus motusque membrorum est). 1 To go thoroughly into the discussion of these stories would require an investigation of the whole subject of the legends of monstrous tribes; but an .off-hand rationalizing explanation may be sufficient here. The frequent use of the gesture-lan- guage by savage tribes in intercourse with strangers may com- bine with the very common opinion of uneducated men that the talk of foreigners is not real speech at all, but a kind of inarticulate chirping, barking, or grunting. Moreover, from using the words " speechless," " tongueless," with the sense of "foreigner," "barbarian," and talking of tribes who have no tongue (no lingo, as our sailors would say), to the point- blank statement that there are races of men without speech and without tongues, is a transition quite in the spirit of mythology. In modern times we hear little of dumb races, at least from I authors worthy of credit ; but we find a number of accounts of ^ people occupying as it were a halfway house between the X^ mythic dumb nations and ourselves, and having a speech so imperfect that even if talking of ordinary matters they have to eke it out by gestures. To begin in the last century, Lord Monboddo says that a certain Dr. Peter Greenhill told him that there was a nation east of Cape Palmas in Africa, who could not understand one another in the dark, and had to supply the wants of their language by gestures. 2 Had Lord Monboddo been the only or the principal authority for stories of this class, we might have left his half-languaged men to keep company with his human apes and tailed men in the regions of my- thology ; but in this matter it will be seen that, right or wrong, he is in very good company. Describing the Puris and Coroados of Brazil, Spix and Martius, having remarked that different tribes converse in 1 Plin. vi. 35. 2 Lord Monboddo, 'Origin and Progress of Language,' 2nd ed.j Edinburgh, 1774„ vol i. p. 253. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WOED-LANGUAGE. 77 signs, and explained the difficulty they found in making them understand by signs the objects or ideas for which they wanted the native names, go on to say how imperfect and devoid of inflexion or construction these languages are. Signs with hand or mouth, they say, are required to make them intelli- gible. To say, u I will go into the wood," the Indian uses the words " wood-go," and points his mouth like a snout in the direction he means. 1 Madame Pfeiffer, too, visited the Puris, and says that for "to-day," "to-morrow," and "yesterday," they have only the word "day;" the rest they express by signs. For " to-day " they say " day," and touch themselves on the head, or point straight upward ; for " to-morrow " they say also "day," pointing forward with the finger; and for y "yesterday," again "day," pointing behind them. 2 Mr. Mercer, describing the low condition of some of the Yeddah tribes of Ceylon, stated that not only is their dialect incomprehensible to a Singhalese, but that even their commu- nications with one another are made by signs, grimaces, and guttural sounds, which bear little or no resemblance to distinct words or systematized language. 3 Dr. Milligan, speaking of the language of Tasmania, and the rapid variation of its dialects, says " The habit of gesticulation, and the use of signs to eke out the meaning of monosyllabic expressions, and to give force, precision, and character to vocal sounds, exerted a further modifying effect, producing, as it did, carelessness and laxity of articulation, and in the appli- cation and pronunciation of words." " To defects in orthoepy the aborigines added short-comings in syntax, for they ob- served no settled order or arrangement of words in the con- struction of their sentences, but conveyed in a supplementary fashion by tone, manner, and gesture those modifications of meaning which we express by mood, tense, number, etc." 4 We find a similar remark made about a tribe of North American Indians, by Captain Burton. " Those natives who, 1 Spix and Martius, ' Keise in Brasilien ; ' Munich, 1823, etc., vol. i. p. 385, etc. 2 Ida Pfeiffer, «Eine Frauenfahrt urn die Erde ;' Vienna, 1850, p. 102. 3 Sir J. Emerson Tennent, 'Ceylon,' 3rd ed. ; London, 1859, vol. ii. p. 441. 4 Milligan, in Papers and Proc. of Koy. Soc. of Tasmania, 1859 ; vol. iii. part ii. 78 GESTURE -LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. like the Arapahos, possess a very scanty vocabulary, pro- nounced in a quasi-unintelligible way, can hardly converse with one another in the dark ; to make a stranger understand them If^ they must always repair to the camp-fire for f pow-wow/ *** Mr. Schoolcraft, whose opinion on the matter would have been valuable, knew of the question, and inserted it in the list of inquiries to be answered by Indian agents, etc. Asking for information about the language of any tribe, he puts the inquiry, No. 345, " Is gesticulation essential to carry out some of its meanings ? ,H The array of evidence in favour of the existence of tribes whose language is incomplete without the help of gesture- signs, even for things of ordinary import, is very remarkable. The matter is important, ethnologically, for could it be taken as proved, that there are really people whose language does not suffice to speak of the common subjects of every- day life with- out the aid of gesture, the fact would either furnish about the strongest case of degeneration known in the history of the human race, or would supply a telling argument in favour of the theory that the gesture -language is the original utterance of mankind, out of which speech has developed itself more or less fully among different tribes. But the evidence does not in any case give all that would be required to prove the fact. Spix and Martius make no claim to having mastered the Puri and Coroado languages. The Coroado words for " to-morrow " and " the day after to-morrow," viz. herinanta and hind heri- nanta, make it unlikely that their neighbours the Puris, who are so nearly on the same level of civilization, have no such words. (I have not had access to a Puri vocabulary, which would probably settle the question.) Mr. Mercer seems to have adopted the common view of foreigners about the Ved- dahs, but it has 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, shows them to be low in cul- ture, but by no means exceptionally so, and he contradicts their supposed deficiency in language with the remark, u I never 1 Burton, ' City of the Saints,' p. 151. 2 Schoolcraft, part i. p. 564. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 79 knew one of them at a loss for words sufficiently intelligible to convey his meaning, not to his fellows only, but to the Sin- ghalese of the neighbourhood, who are all, more or less, ac- quainted with the Veddah patois." 1 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 informa- tion, which is far from being always safe. 2 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 civilized, do use signs more or less. As has been remarked already, many savage tribes accompany their talk with ges- tures 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 ~J . 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 such a point must be very great. There is a point of some practical importance involved in the question, whether gestures or words are, so to speak, most / natural. If signs form an easier means for the reception and expression of ideas than words, then idiots ought to learn to understand and use gestures more readily than speech. I have only been able to get a distinct answer to the question, 1 J. Bailey, in Tr. Eth. Soc. ; London, 1863, p. 300. 2 The objection to trusting native information as to grammatical structure, may 80 GESTUEE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. whether they do so or not, from one competent judge in such a matter, Dr. Scott, of Exeter, who assures me that semi- idiotic children, to whom there is no hope of teaching more than the merest rudiments of speech, are yet capable of re- ceiving a considerable amount of knowledge by means of signs, and of expressing themselves by them. It is well known that a certain class of children are dumb from deficiency of intellect, rather than from want of the sense of hearing, and it is to these that the observation applies. 1 The idea of solving the problem of the origin of language by actual experiment, must have very often been started. There are several stories of such an experiment having been tried, the first being Herodotus' s well-known tale of Psamm- tichus, King of Egypt, who had the two children brought up by a silent keeper, and suckled by goats. The first word they said, bekos, meaning bread in the Phrygian language, of course proved that the Phrygians were the oldest race of mankind. It is a very trite remark that there is nothing absolutely in- credible in the story, and that bek, ~bek, is a good imitative word for bleating, as in (3\rr%aoiiai, ybi)Kao^ai, bloJcen, meckem, etc. But the very name of Psammitichus, who has served as a lay-figure for so many tales to be draped upon, is fatal to any claim to the historical credibility of such a story. He sounds the springs of the Nile with a cord thousands of fathoms long, and finds no bottom; he accomplishes the prediction of one oracle by pouring a libation out of a brazen helmet, and of another, concerning cocks, by leading an army of Carians, with crested helmets, against Tementhes, king of Egypt, and he figures in the Greek version of the story of Cinderella's slipper. It is interesting to see how naturally mythology takes to the bekos-legend, and. brings it out in a new place. Miss Good- man says, " A Scotch lady staying in the house, informed me that one of the early kings of her country, anxious to discover the be seen in the difficulty, so constantly met with in investigating the languages of rude tribes, of getting a substantive from a native without a personal pronoun tacked to it. Thus in Dr. Milligan's vocabulary, the expressions puggan neena, noonalmeena, given for " husband " and " father," seem really to mean " your hus- band," "my father," or something of the kind. 1 See W. E. Scott, 'Remarks on the Education of Idiots :' London, 1847. GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 81 primitive language, placed two infants on an uninhabited island in the Hebrides, under the care of a dumb old woman," etc. 1 - The third story is told of the great Mogul, Akbar Khan. It is mentioned by Purchas, only twenty years after Akbar's death, 2 and told in detail by the Jesuit Father Catrou, as follows : — M Indeed it may be said that desire of knowledge was Akr bar's ruling passion, and his curiosity induced him to try a very strange experiment. He wished to ascertain what lan- guage children would speak without teaching, a& he had heard that Hebrew was the natural language of those who had been taught no other. To settle the question, he had twelve children at the breast shut up in a castle six leagues from Agra, and brought up by twelve dumb nurses. A porter, who was dumb also, was put in charge and forbidden on pain of death to open the castle door. When the children were twelve years old [there is a decided feeling for duodecimals in the story], he had them brought before him, and collected in his palace men skilled in all languages. A Jew who was at Agra was to judge whether the children spoke Hebrew. There was no difficulty in finding Arabs and Chaldeans in the capital. On the other hand the Indian philosophers asserted that the children would speak the Hanscrit 3 language, which takes the place of Latin among them, and is only in use among the learned, and is learnt in order to understand the ancient Indian books of Philosophy and Theology. When how- ever the children appeared before the Emperor, every one was astonished to find that they did not speak any language at all. They had learnt from their nurses to do without any, and they merely expressed their thoughts by gestures which answered the purpose of words. They were so savage and so shy that it was a work of some trouble to tame them and to loosen their tongues, which they had scarcely used during their in- fancy." 4 1 Margaret Goodman, ' Experiences of an English Sister of Mercy ;' London, 1862, p. 51. 2 Purchas, His Pilgrimes ; London, 1625-6, vol. v. (1626) p. 516. 3 I. e. Sanskrit, after the Persian form of the word. 4 Catrou, Hist. Gen. de l'Empire du Mogol ; Paris, 1705, p. 259, etc. G 82 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. There may possibly be a foundation of fact for this story, which fits very well with what is known of Akbar's unscru- pulous character, and his greediness for knowledge. More- over it tells in its favour, that had a story-teller invented it, he would hardly have brought it to what must have seemed to him such a lame and impotent conclusion, as that the children spoke no language at all. 83 CHAPTER V. PICTURE -WRITING AND WORD -WRITING. The art of recording events, and sending messages, by means of pictures representing the things or actions in question, is called Picture-Writing. The deaf-and-dumb man's remark, that the gesture-language is a picture-language, finds its counterpart in an observation of Wilhelm von Humboldt's, that " In fact, gesture, destitute of sound, is a species of writing." There is indeed a very close relation between these two ways of expressing and communi- cating thought. Gesture can set forth thought with far greater speed and fulness than picture-writing, but it is* inferior to it in having to place the different elements of a sentence in suc- cession, in single file, so to speak; while by a picture the whole of an event may be set in view at one glance, and that permanently, so as to serve as a message to a distant place or a record to a future time. But the imitation of visible qua- lities as a means of expressing ideas, is common to both me- thods, and both belong to similar conditions of the human mind. Both are found in very distant countries and times, and spring up naturally under favourable circumstances, pro- vided that a higher means of supplying the same wants has not already occupied the place which they can only fill very partially and rudely. There being so great a likeness between the conditions which cause the use of the gesture-language and of picture- writing, it is not surprising to find the natives of North Ame- g2 84 PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. rica as great proficients in the one as in the other. Their pictures, as drawn and interpreted by Schoolcraft and other writers, give the best information that is to be had of the lower development of the art. 1 Fig. 2 is an Indian record on a blazed pine-tree (to blaze a tree is to wound (blesser) its side with an axe, so as to mark it with a conspicuous white patch) . On the right are two canoes (2 and 4), with a cat- Fig. 2. fish (1) in one of them, and a fabulous animal, known as the copper- tailed bear (3), in the other. On the left are a bear and six catfish ; and the sense of the picture is simply that two hunters, whose names, or rather totems or clan-names, were " Copper-tailed Bear" and " Catfish," went out on a hunting expedition in their canoes, and took a bear and six catfish. ^ Fig. 3. . Fig. 3 is a picture on the face of a rock on the shore of Lake Superior, and records an expedition across the lake, which was led by Myeengun, or " Wolf," a celebrated Indian chief. The canoes with the upright strokes in them represent the force of the party in men and boats, and Wolf's chief ally, Kishke- munasee, that is, ' ' "Kingfisher," goes in the first canoe. The 1 Figs. 2 to 7, and their interpretations, are from Schoolcraft, parti PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 85 Fig. 4. arch with three circles below it shows that there were three suns under heaven, that is, that the voyage took three days. The tortoise seems to indicate their getting to land, while the representation of the chief himself on horseback shows that the expedition took place since the time when horses were intro- duced into Canada. The Indian grave-posts, Fig. 4, tell their story in the same childlike manner. Upon one is a tortoise, the dead warrior's totem, and a figure beside it represent- ing a headless man, which shows he is dead. Be- low are his three marks of honour. On the other post there is no separate sign for death, but the chief's totem, a crane, is reversed. Six marks of honour are awarded to him on the right, and three on the left. The latter represent three important general treaties of peace which he had attended; the former would seem to stand for six war -parties or battles. The pipe and hatchet are symbols of influence in peace and war. The great defect of this kind of record is that it can only be understood within a very limited circle. It does not tell the story at length, as is done in explaining it in words ; but it merely suggests some event, of which it only gives such details as are required to enable a practised observer to construct a complete picture. It may be compared in this respect to the elliptical forms of expression which are current in all societies whose attention is given specially to some narrow subject of interest, and where, as all men's minds have the same frame- work set up in them, it is not necessary to go into an elaborate description of the whole state of things ; but one or two details are enough to enable the hearer to understand the whole. Such expressions as ' ' new white at 48," " best selected at 92," though perfectly understood in the commercial circles where they are current, are as unintelligible to any one who is not 86 PTCTURE-WRITTNG AND WORD- WRITING. familiar with, the course of events in those circles, as an Indian record of a war-party would be to an ordinary Londoner. Though, however, familiarity with the picture-writing of the Indians, as well as with their habits and peculiarities, might enable the student to make a pretty good guess at the mean- ing of such documents as the above, which, are meant to be understood by strangers, there is another class of picture- writings, used principally by the magicians or medicine-men, which cannot be even thus interpreted. The songs and charms used among the Indians of North America are repeated or sung by memory, but, as an assistance to the singer, pictures are painted upon sticks, or pieces of birch-bark or other material, which serve to suggest to the mind the successive verses. Some of these documents, with the songs to which they refer, are given in Schoolcraft, and one or two examples will show sufficiently how they are used, and make it evident that they can only convey their full meaning to those who know by heart already the compositions they refer to. They are mere Samson's rid- dles, only to be guessed by those who have ploughed with his heifer. Thus, a drawing of a man with two marks on his breast and four on his legs (Fig. 5) is to remind the singer that lg " ' at this place comes the following verse : — " Two days must you fast, my friend, — Four days must you sit still." Fig. 6. Fig. 6 is the record of a love-song — (1) represents the lover in (2) he is singing, and beating a magic drum ; in (3) he sur- PICTURE -WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 87 rounds himself with a secret lodge, denoting the effects of his necromancy ; in (4) he and his mistress are shown joined by a single arm, to indicate the union of their affections ; in (5) she is shown on an island; in (6) she is asleep, and his voice is shown, while his magical powers are reaching her heart ; and the heart itself is shown in (7). To each of these figures a verse of the song corresponds. 1. It is my painting that makes me a god. 2. Hear the sounds of my voice, of my song ; it is my voice. 3. I cover myself in sitting down by her. 4. I can make her blush, because I hear all she says of me. 5. "Were she on a distant island, I could make her swim over. 6. Though she were far off, even on the other hemisphere. 7. I speak to your heart. Kg. 7. Fig. 7 is a war- song. The warrior is shown in (1) ; he is drawn with wings, to show that he is active and swift of foot. In (2) he stands under the morning star ; in (3) he is standing under the centre of heaven, with his war- club and rattle; in (4) the eagles of carnage are flying round the sky ; in (5) he lies slain on the field of battle ; and in (6) he appears as a spirit in the sky. The words are th^se : — 1. I wish to have the body of the swiftest bird. 2. Every day I look at you ; the half of the day I sing my song. 3. I throw away my body. 4. The birds take a flight in the air. 5. Full happy am I to be numbered with the slain. 6. The spirits on high repeat my name. 88 FICTUEE-WRrTING AND WOKD-WKITTNG.: • Catlin tells how the chief of the Kickapoos, a man of great ability, generally known as the tx Shawnee Prophet/' having, as was said, learnt the doctrines of Christianity from a mis- sionary, taught them to his tribe, pretending to have received a supernatural mission. He composed a prayer, which he wrote down on aflat stick, "in characters somewhat resem- bling Chinese letters." When Catlin visited the tribe, every man, woman, and child used to repeat this prayer morning and evening, placing the fore-finger under the first character, repeating a sentence or two, and so going on to the next, till the prayer, which took some ten minutes to repeat, was finished. 1 I do not know whether any of these curious prayer- sticks are now to be seen, but they were probably made on the same principle as the suggestive pictures used for the native Indian songs. Picture-writing is found among savage races in all quarters of the globe, and, so far as we can judge, its principle is the same everywhere. The pictures on the Lapland magic drums, of which we have interpretations, serve much the same purpose as the American writing. Savage paintings, or scratchings, or carvings on rocks, have a family likeness, whether we find them in North or South America, in Siberia or Australia. The interpretation of rock-pictures, which mostly consist of few figures, is in general a hopeless task, unless a key is to be had. Many are, no doubt, mere pictorial utterances, drawings of animals and things without any historical sense; some are names, as the totems carved by those who sprang upon the dangerous leaping-rock at the Eed Pipestone Quarry. 2 Dupaix noticed in Mexico a sculptured eagle, apparently on the boundary of Quauhnahuac, " the place near the eagle/' now called Cuernavaca, 3 and the fact suggests that rock-sculptures may often be, like this, symbolic boundary-marks. But there is seldom a key to be had to the reading of rock-sculptures, which the natives generally say were done by the people long 1 Catlin, ' North American Indians,' 7th ed.; London, 1848, vol. ii. p. 98. 2 Catlin, vol. ii. p. 170. 3 Lord Kingsborough, * Antiquities of Mexico ;' London, 1830, etc., vol. iv. part i., no. 31, and vol. v. Expl. PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 89 ago. I have seen them in Mexico on cliffs where one can hardly imagine how the savage sculptors can have climbed. When Humboldt asked the Indians of the Oronoko who it was that sculptured the figures of animals and symbolic signs high up on the face of the crags along the river, they answered with a smile, as relating a fact of which only a stranger, a white man, could possibly be ignorant, { ' that at the time of the great waters their fathers went up to that height in their canoes." 1 As the gesture -language is substantially the same among savage tribes all over the world, and also among children who cannot speak, so the picture-writings of savages are not only similar to one another, but are like what children make un- taught even in civilized countries. Like the universal language of gestures, the art of picture-writing tends to prove that the mind of the uncultured man works in much the same way at all times and everywhere. As an example of the way in which it is possible for an observer who has never realized this fact to be led astray by such a general resemblance, the celebrated " Livre des Sauvages " may be adduced. This book of pictures had been lying for many years in a Paris library, before the Abbe Domenech unearthed it and published it in facsimile, as a native American document of high ethnological value. It contains a number of rude drawings done in black lead and red chalk, in great part enormously in- decent, though perhaps not so much with the grossness of the savage as of the European blackguard. Many of the drawings represent Scripture scenes, and ceremonies of the Roman Ca- tholic church, often accompanied by explanatory German words in the cursive hand, one or two of which, as the name " Maria " written close to a rude figure of the Virgin Mary, the Abbe succeeded in reading, though most of them were a deep mystery to him. There are an evident Adam and Eve in the garden, with " betruger " (deceiver) written against them ; Adam and Eve sent out of Paradise, with the description " gebant " (banished) ; a priest offering mass ; figures with the well-known rings of bread in their hands, explained as " fass- dag " (fast-day), and so on. There is no evidence of any con- 1 Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. ii. p. 239. 90 PICTUEE-WEITING AND WOKD-WRITING. nexion with. America in the whole matter, except that the docu- ment is said to have come into the hands of a collector, in com- pany with an Iroquois dictionary, and that the editor says it is written on Canadian paper, but he gives no reason for thinking so. So far as one can judge from the published copy, it may have been done by a German boy in his own country. One of the drawings shows a man with what seems a mitre on his head, speaking to three figures standing reverently before him. This personage is entitled " grosshud M (great-hat), a common term among the German Jews, who speak of their rabbis, in all reverence, as the i( great hats." The Abbe Domenech had spent many years in America, and was, no doubt, well acquainted with Indian pictures. More- over, the resemblance which struck him as existing between the pictures he had been used to see among the Indians, and those in the " Book of the Savages," is quite a real one. A great part of .the pictures, if painted on birch-bark or deer- skins, might pass as Indian work. The mistake he made was that his generalization was too narrow, and that he founded his argument on a likeness which was only caused by the similarity of the early development of the human mind. Map -making is a branch of picture-writing with which the savage is quite familiar, and he is often more skilful in it than the generality of civilized men. In Tahiti, for instance, the natives were able to make maps for the guidance of foreign visitors. 1 Maps made with raised lines are mentioned as in use in Peru before the Conquest, 2 and there is no doubt about the skill of the North American . Indians and Esquimaux in the art, as may be seen by a number of passages in Schoolcraft and elsewhere. 3 The oldest map known to be in existence is the map of the ^Ethiopian gold-mines, dating from the time of Sethos I., the father of Rameses II., 4 long enough 1 Gustav Klemin, « Allgemeine Cultur-Greschichte der Menschheit ; ' Leipzig, 1843-52, vol. iv. p. 396. 2 Kivero and v. Tschudi, c Antigiiedades Peruanas ; ' Vienna, 1851, p. 124. Prescott, ' Peru ; ' yol. i. p. 116. 3 Schoolcraft, part i. pp. 334, 353 ; part iii. pp. 256, 485. Harmon, ' Journal ;' Andover, 1820, p. 371. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. pp. 189, 280. 4 Birch, in ■ Archaeologia,' vol. xxxiv. p. 382. PICTURE- WRITING AND WORD- WRITING. 9t before the time of tlie bronze tablet of Aristagoras, on which was inscribed the circuit of the whole earth, and all the sea and all rivers. 1 The highest development of the art of picture-writing is to be found among the ancient Mexicans. Their productions of this kind are far better known than those of the Ked Indians, and are indeed much more artistic, as well as being more systematic and copious. Some of the most characteristic specimens have been drawn and described by Alexander von Humboldt, and Lord Kingsborough's great work contains a huge mass of them, which he published in facsimile in support of his views upon that philosopher's stone of ethnologists, the Lost Tribes of Israel. The bulk of the Mexican paintings are mere pictures, directly representing migrations, wars, sacrifices, deities, arts, tributes, and such matters, in a way not differing in principle from that of the lowest savages. But in the historical records and calen- dars, the events are accompanied by a regular notation of years, and sometimes of divisions of years, which entitles them to be considered as regularly dated history. The art of dating events was indeed not unknown to the Northern Indians. A resident among the Kristinaux (generally called for shortness, Crees), who knew them before they were in their present half- civilized state, says that they had names for the moons which make up the year, calling them "whirlwind moon," "moon when the fowls go to the south," " moon when the leaves fall off from the trees," and so on. When a hunter left a record of his chase pictured on a piece of birch-bark, for the information of others who might pass that way, he would draw a picture which showed the name of the month, and make beside it a drawing of the shape of the moon at the time, so accurately, that an Indian could tell within twelve or twenty-four hours, the month and the day of the month, when the record was set up. 2 It is even related of the Indians of "Virginia, that they re- corded time by certain hieroglyphic wheels, which they called " Sagkokok Quiacosough," or " record of the gods." These wheels had sixty spokes, each for a year, as if to mark the 1 Herod, v. 49. 2 Harmon, p. 37k 92 PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD- WRITING. ordinary age of man, and they were painted on skins kept by the principal priests in the temples. They marked on each spoke or division a hieroglyphic figure, to show the memorable events of the year. John Lederer saw one in a village called Pommacomek, on which the year of the first arrival of the Europeans was marked by a swan spouting fire and smoke from its mouth. The white plumage of the bird and its living on the water indicated the white faces of the Europeans and their coming by sea, while the fire and smoke coming from its mouth meant their firearms. 1 Thus the ancient Mexicans (as well as the civilized nations of Central America, who used a similar system) can only claim to have dated their records more generally and systematically than the ruder North Ameri- can tribes. The usual way of recording series of years among the Mexi- cans has been often described. It consists in the use of four symbols — tochtli, acatl, tecpatl, calli, i. e. rabbit, cane, cutting- stone, house, each symbol being numbered by dots from 1 to 13, making thus 52 distinct signs. Each year of a cycle of 52 has thus a distinct numbered symbol belonging to it alone, the numbering of course not going beyond 13. These numbered symbols are, however, not arranged in their reasonable order, but the signs change at the same time as the numbers, till all the 52 combinations are exhausted, the order being 1 rabbit, 2 cane, 3 knife, 4 house, 5 rabbit, 6 cane, and so on. I have pointed out elsewhere the singular coincidence of a Mexican cycle with an ordinary French or English pack of playing-cards, which, arranged on this plan, as for instance ace of hearts, 2 of spades, 3 of diamonds, 4 of clubs, 5 of hearts again, and so on, forms an exact counterpart of an Aztec cycle of years. The account of days was kept by series combined in a similar way, but in different numbers. 2 The extraordinary analogy between the Mexican system of reckoning years in cycles, and that still in use over a great part 1 ' Journal des Scavans,' 1681, p. 46. Sir W. Talbot, ■ The Discoveries of John, Lederer;' London, 1672, p. 4. Humboldt, 'Yues des Cordilleres j ' Paris, 1810-12, pi. xiii. 2 Tylo:-, ■ Mexico and the Mexicans ;' London, 1861, p. 239. PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 93 of Asia, forms the strongest point of Humboldt's argument for the connexion of the Mexicans with Eastern Asia, and the re- markable character of the coincidence is greatly enforced by the fact, that this complex arrangement answers no useful pur- pose whatever, inasmuch as mere counting by numbers, or by signs numbered in regular succession, would have been a far better arrangement. It may perhaps have been introduced for some astrological purpose. The historical picture-writings of the Mexicans seem for the most part very bare and dull to us, who know and care so little about their history. They consist of records of wars, famines, migrations, sacrifices, and so forth, names of persons and places being indicated by symbolic pictures attached to them, as King Itzcoatl, or " knife- snake," by a serpent with stone knives on its back ; Tzompanco, or " the pla.ce of a skull," now Zum- pango, by a picture of a skull skewered on a bar between two upright posts, as enemies' skulls used to be set up; Chapulte- pec, or ' ' grasshopper-hill," by a hill and a grasshopper, and so on, or by more properly phonetic characters, such as will be presently described. The positions of footprints, arrows, etc., serve as guides to the direction of marches and attacks, in very much the same way as may be seen in Catlin's drawing of the pictured robe of Ma-to-toh-pa, or " Four Bears." The mystical paintings which relate to religion and astrology are seldom capable of any independent interpretation, for the same rea- sons which make it impossible to read the pictured records of songs and charms used further north, namely, that they do not tell their stories in full, but only recall them to the minds of those who are already acquainted with them. The paintings which represent the methodically arranged life of the Aztecs from childhood to old age, have more human interest about them than all the rest put together. In judging the Mexican picture-writings as a means of record, it should be borne in mind that though we can understand them to a considerable extent, we should have made very little progress in deciphering them, were it not that there are a number of interpretations made in writing from the explanations given by Indians, so that the traditions of the art have never been wholly lost. Some 94 PICTUEE -WRITING AND WORD -WRITING. few of the Mexican pictures now in existence may perhaps be original documents made before the arrival of the Spaniards, and great part of those drawn since are certainly copied, wholly or in part, from such original pictures. It is to M. Aubin, of Paris, a most zealous student of Mexi- can antiquities, that we owe our first clear knowledge of a phe- nomenon of great scientific interest in the history of writing. This is a well-defined system of phonetic characters, which Clavigero and Humboldt do not seem to have been aware of, as it does not appear in their descriptions of the art. 1 Hum- boldt indeed speaks of vestiges of phonetic hieroglyphics among the Aztecs, but the examples he gives are only names in which meaning, rather than mere sound, is represented, as in the pictures of a face and water for Axayacatl, or u Water- Face," five dots and a flower for Macuilxochitl, or ' * Five-Flowers." So Clavigero gives in his list the name of King Itzcoatl, or " Knife- Snake," as represented by a picture of a snake with stone knives upon its back, a more genuine drawing of which is given here (Fig. 8), from the Le Tellier Codex. This is mere iik m ^> Fig. 8. Fig. 9. picture-writing, but the way in which the same king's name is written in the Yergara Codex, as shown in Fig. 9, is something very different. Here the first syllable, itz, is indeed repre- sented by a weapon armed with blades of obsidian, itz (tli) ; but the rest of the word, coatl, though it means snake, is written, not by a picture of a snake, but by an earthen pot, co (mitl) , and above it the sign of water, a (tl) . Here we have real phonetic writing, for the name is not to be read, according to sense, " knife -kettle- water," but only according to the sound 1 Clavigero, ' Storia Antica del Messico ;' Cesena, 1780-1, toI. ii. pp. 191, etc., 248, etc. . Humboldt, Vues des Cord., pi. xiii. PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 95 n '£? of the Aztec words, Itz-co-atl. Again, in Fig. 10, in the name of Teocaltitlan, which means " the place of the god's house/' the different syllables (with the exception of the ti, which is only put in for euphony) are written by (b) *1 ""^ — ' lips, (c) a path (with footmarks on it), (a) a house, (d) teeth. What this combination of pictures means is only explained by knowing that lips, path, house, teeth, are called in Aztec te (ntli), o (tli), col (li) tlan (tli), and thus come to stand for the word Te-o-cal-(ti)-tlan. The device is perfectly familiar to us in what is called a " rebus/' as where Prior Burton's name is sculptured in St. Saviour's Church as a cask with a thistle on it, " burr-tun." Indeed, the puzzles of this kind in children's books keep alive to our own day the great transition stage from picture-writing to word- writing, the highest intellectual effort of one period in our history coming down, as so often happens, to be the child's play of a later time. M. Aubin may be considered as the discoverer of these pho- netic signs in the Mexican pictures, or at least he is the first who has worked them out systematically and published a list of them. 1 But- the ancient written interpretations have been standing for centuries to prove their existence. Thus, in the Mendoza Codex, the name of a place pictured as in Fig. 11 by a fishing-net and teeth, is interpre- tated Matlatlan, that is " Net-Place." Now, matla (tl) means a net, and so far the name is a picture, but the teeth, tlan (tli), are used, not pictorially but phonetically, for tlan, place. Other more complicated names, such as Acolma, Quauhpanoayan, etc., are written in like manner in phonetic symbols in the same document: 2 There is no sufficient reason to make us doubt that this 1 Aubin, in ' Kevue Orientale et Americaine,' vols, iii.-v. Brasseur, Hist, des Nat. Civ. du Mexique et de l'Amerique Centrale ; Paris, 1857-9, vol. i. An attempt to prove the existence of something more nearly approaching alphabetic signs (Rev., vol. iv. p. 276-7 ; Brasseur, p. lxviu.) requires much clearer evidence. 2 Kingsborough, vol. i., and Expl. in vol. vi. 96 PICTUKE-WEITING AND WOED-WEITING. purely phonetic writing was of native Mexican origin, and after the Spanish Conquest they turned it to account in a new and curious way. The Spanish missionaries, when embarrassed by the difficulty of getting the converts to remember their Ave Marias and Paternosters, seeing that the words were of course mere nonsense to them, were helped out by the Indians them- selves, who substituted Aztec words as near in sound as might be to the Latin, and wrote down the pictured equivalents for these words, which enabled them to remember the required formulas. Torquemada and Las Casas have recorded two in- stances of this device, that Pater noster was written by a flag (pantli) and a prickly pear (nochtli), while the sign of water, a (tl) combined with that of aloe, me (tl) made a compound word ametl, which would mean " water-aloe," but in sound made a very tolerable substitute for Amen. 1 But M. Aubin has ac- tually found the beginning of a Paternoster of this kind in the f metropolitan library of Mexico £^3 (Fig. 12), made with a flag, pa (ntli), a stone, te (tl), a prickly pa- te noch- te. pear, ?ioc7i (tli), and again a stone, lg ' " te (tl), and which would read Pa-te noch-te, or perhaps Pa-tetl noch-tetl. 2 After the conquest, when the Spaniards were hard at work introducing their own religion and civilization among the con- quered Mexicans, they found it convenient to allow the old picture-writing still to be used, even in legal documents. It disappeared in time, of course, being superseded in the long- run by the alphabet ; but it is to this transition -period that we owe many, perhaps most, of the picture- documents still pre- served. Copies of old historical paintings were made and con- tinued to dates after the arrival of Cortes, and the use of re- cords written in pictures, or in a mixture of pictures and Spanish or Aztec words in ordinary writing, relating to lawsuits, the inheritance of property, genealogies, etc., were in constant use for many years later, and special officers were appointed under government to interpret such documents. To this transition- period, the writing whence the "name of Teocaltitlan (Fig. 10) 1 Brasseur, toL i. p. xli. 2 £ u bi nj EeY# . and A., vol. iii. p. 255. PICTURE- WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 97 is taken, clearly belongs, as appears by the drawing of the house with its arched door. A genealogical table of a native family in the possession of Mr. Christy is as good a record of this time of transition as could well be cited. The names in it are written, but are ac- companied by male and female heads drawn in a style that is certainly Aztec. The names themselves tell the story of the change that was going on in the country. One branch of the family, among whom are to be read the names of Citlalmecatl, or u Star-Necklace," and Cohuacihuatl, or " Snake-Woman/' ends in a lady with the Spanish name of Justa ; while another branch, beginning with such names as Tlapalxilotzin and Xiuh- cozcatzin, finishes with Juana and her children Andres and Francisco. The most thoroughly native thing in the whole is a figure referring to an ancestor of Justa's, and connected with his name by a line of footprints to show how the line is to be followed, in true Aztec fashion. The figure itself is a head drawn in native style, with the eye in full front, though the face is in profile, in much the same way as an Egyptian would have drawn it, and it is set in a house as a symbol of dignity, having written over against it the high title of Ompamozcalti- totzaqualtzinco, which, if I may trust the imperfect dictionary of Molina, and my own weak knowledge of Aztec, means " His excellency our twice skilful gaoler." The importance of this Mexican phonetic system in the His- tory of the Art of Writing may be perhaps made clearer by a comparison of the Aztec pictures with the Egyptian hierogly- phics. Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions consist of figures of ob- jects, animate and inanimate, men and animals, and parts of them, plants, the heavenly bodies, and an immense number of different weapons, tools, and articles of the most miscellaneous character. These figures are arranged in upright columns or horizontal bands, and are to be read in succession, but they are not all intended to act upon the mind in the same way. When an ordinary inscription is taken to pieces, it is found that the figures composing it fall into two great classes. Part of them are to be read and understood as pictures, a drawing of H 98 PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. a horse for " horse/' a branch for " wood," etc., upon the same principle as in any savage picture-writing. The other part of the figures are phonetic. Thus the figure of a strap, the name of which is m-s, becomes a phonetic sign to write the sound m-s with. (The - stands for some vowel, which is represented by ou in the Coptic form of the word, mous.) Again, there are many characters which Champollion held to be pure conso- nants, f, r, and so forth. They are certainly so in the spelling of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, Tiberius and Hadrian, and such fo- reign names, and even in writing pure Egyptian words at a much earlier date, where they come at the ends of words, as where the mouth, to or ru, ends the word Jcar (under, with), being there nothing but the letter r. Modern Egyptologists, however, hold Champollion to have gone too far in reducing phonetic characters to mere letters; for instance, Mr. Birch reads as lea and pu the h- and p- sounds which Champollion set down as mere letters h and p in his alphabet. For prac- tical purposes in interpreting Egyptian inscriptions, the dis- tinction is of very little consequence, for vowels are very hazy things in the ancient Egyptian, as in its successor the Coptic, and it may be allowable to go on writing Egyptian words whose vowels are indefinite, as though they had none at all. But the syllabic theory (it is not a new view, for Dr. Young held it before Champollion went away from it) is of great in- terest in the history of writing, as giving the whole course of development, by which a picture, of a mouth for instance, meant first simply mouth, then the name of mouth ro, and lastly dropped its vowel and became the letter r. Of these three steps, the Mexicans made the first two. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, special figures are not always set apart for phonetic use. At least, a number of signs are used sometimes as letters, and sometimes as pictures, in which latter case they are often marked with a stroke. Thus the mouth, with a stroke to it, is usually (though not always) pictorial, as it were, ' ' one mouth," while without the stroke it is r or ro, and so on. The words, of a sentence are generally written by a combination of these two methods, that is, by spelling the word first, and then adding a picture sign to re- P1CTUEE-WEITING AND WOED« WETTING. 99 move all doubt as to its meaning. Thus the letters read as fnti in an inscription, followed by a drawing of a worm, mean " worm " (Coptic, fent) , and the letters kk, followed by the picture of a star hanging from heaven, mean " darkness" (Cop- tic, hake) . There may even be words written in ancient hiero- glyphics which are still alive in English. Thus hbn, followed by two signs, one of which is the determinative for wood, is ebony; and tb, followed by the drawing of a brick, is a sun- dried brick, Coptic tobe, tobi, which seems to have passed into the Arabic tob, or with the article, attob, thence into Spanish through the Moors, as adobe, in which form, and as dobie, it is current among the English-speaking population of America. The Egyptians do not seem to have entirely got rid of their determinative pictures even in the latest form of their native writing, the demotic character. How it came to pass that, having come so early to the use of phonetic writing, they were later than other nations in throwing off the crutches of pic- ture-signs, is a curious question. No doubt the poverty of their language, which expressed so many things by similar combina- tions of consonants, and the indefiniteness of their vowels, had to do with it, just as we see that poverty of language, and the consequent necessity of making similar words do duty for many different ideas, has led the Chinese to use in their writing de- terminative signs, the so-called keys or radicals, which were originally pictures, though now hardly recognizable as such. Nothing proves that the Egyptian determinative signs were not mere useless lumber, so well as the fact that if there had been none, the deciphering of the hieroglyphics in modern times could hardly have gone a step beyond the first stage, the reading of the kings' names. We thus see that the ancient Egyptians and the Aztecs made in much the same way the great step from picture- writing to word-writing. To have used the picture of an object to represent the sound of the root or crude-form of its name, as the Mexicans did in drawing a hand, ma (itl) , to represent, not a hand, but the sound ma; and teeth, tlan (tli), to represent, not teeth, but the sound tlan, though they do not seem to have applied it to anything but the writing of h2 100 PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. proper names and foreign words, is sufficient to show that they had started on the road which led the Egyptians to a system of syllabic, and to some extent of alphabetic writing. There is even evidence that the Maya nation of Yucatan, the ruins of whose temples and palaces are so well known from the tra- vels of Catherwood and Stephens, not only had a system of phonetic writing, but used it for writing ordinary words and sentences. A Spanish MS., 'Relacion de las Cosas de Yu- catan/ bearing the date of 1561, and the name of Diego de Landa, Bishop of Merida, has just been published by the Abbe Brasseur, 1 and contains not only a set of chronological signs resembling the figures of the Central American sculptures and the Dresden Codex, but a list of over thirty characters, some alphabetic, as a, i, m, n; some syllabic, as ku, ti; and a sen- tence, ma in Tcati, "I will not," written with them. The genuineness of this information, and its bearing on the inter- pretation of the inscriptions on the monuments, are, of course, matters for future investigation. Yet another people, the Chinese, made the advance from pictures to phonetic writing, and it was perhaps because of the peculiar character of their spoken language that they did it in so different a way. The whole history of their art of writing still lies open to us. They began by drawing the plainest outlines of sun, moon, tortoise, fish, boy, hatchet, tree, dog, and so forth, and thus forming characters which are still extant, and are known as the Ku-wan, or " ancient pictures." 2 Such pictures, though so much altered that, were not their ancient forms still to be seen, it would hardly be safe to say they had ever been pictures at all, are still used to some extent in Chinese writing, as in the characters for man, sun, moon, tree, etc. There are also combined pictorial signs, as water and eye for " tears," and other kinds of purely symbolic characters. But the great mass of characters at present in use are double, con- sisting of two signs, one for sound, the other for sense. They 1 Brasseur, ■ Relation des Choses de Yucatan de Diego de Landa,' etc. ; Paris and London, 1864. 2 J. M. Callery, ' Systema Phoneticum Scripture Sinica?,' part i. j Macao, 1841, p. 29. Endlicher, Chin. Gramm., p. 3, etc. PICTURE- WRITING AND WORD- WRITING. 101 are called king- thing, that is, "pictures and sounds." In one of the two signs the transition from the picture of the object to the sound of its name has taken place ; in the other it has not, but it is still a picture, and its use (something like that of the determinative in the Egyptian hieroglyphics) is to define which of the meanings belonging to the spoken word is to be taken. Thus a ship is called in Chinese chow, so a picture of a ship stands for the sound chow. But the word chow means several other things; and to show which is intended in any- particular instance, a determinative sign or key is attached to it. Thus the ship joined with the sign of water stands for chow, "ripple," with that of speech for chow, "loquacity," with that of fire, for chow, " flickering of flame ?* and so on for " waggon-pole," u fluff," and several other things, which have little in common but the name of chow. If we agreed that pictures of a knife, a tree, an 0, should be determinative signs of things which have to do with cutting, with plants, and with numbers, we might make a drawing of a pear to do duty, with the assistance of one of these determinative signs, for pare, pear, paAr. In a language so poverty-stricken as the Chinese, which only allows itself so small a stock of words, and therefore has to make the same sound stand for so many different ideas, the use of such a system needs no explanation. Looking now at the history of purely alphabetic writing, it has been shown that there is one alphabet, that of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the development of which (and of course of its derived forms) is clearly to be traced from the stage of pure pictures to that of pure letters. Some few of these interesting characters are even now in use. The Coptic Christians still keep up in their churches their sacred" language, which is a direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian ; and the Coptic alphabet, in which it is written and printed, was formed in early Christian times by adding to the Greek alphabet certain new characters to express articulations not properly belonging to the Greek. Among these additional letters, at least four seem clearly to be taken from the old hieroglyphics, probably from their hieratic or cursive form, and thus to preserve an unbroken tradition at once from the period of picture-writing to that of the alphabet, 102 PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. and from times earlier than the building of the pyramids up to the present day. But as to the ultimate origin of most of the alphabets which are or have been in use in the world, we have no such satis- factory information as this. Thus, though the great family of alphabets to which the Koman letters belong with the Greek, the Gothic, the Northern Kunes, etc., may be easily traced back into connection with the Phoenician and Old Hebrew characters, it is a very different question to tell how these ancient Semitic letters came to be made. The theory main- tained by Gesenius, that the Phoenician and Old Hebrew letters / are rude pictures of Aleph the Ox, Beth the House, Gimel the Camel, etc., may, I think, be shown to be unsafe. Some of the resemblances may possibly be real, though they are mostly very slight and indefinite ; and while (after setting aside words of very doubtful or fanciful etymology, as Zayin, Koph, He) there appear to be some eleven letters which are more or less like the meanings of their names, pure chance may be shown to produce nearly as many coincidences as this. At least, if we turn the list upside down, and put Tau against the letter Aleph, and so on, it seems to me that there will be found some- thing like eight resemblances of about the same strength, or weakness. Again, the theory that the names of the letters date from the time when these letters were first formed, and thus record the very process of their formation, is a very bold one, considering that we know by experience how slight the bond is which may attach the name to the letter. Two alpha- bets, which are actually descended from that which is also represented by the Phoenician and Hebrew, have taken to themselves new sets of name's belonging to the languages they were used to write, simply choosing for each letter a word which began with it. The names of our Anglo-Saxon Bunes are Feoh (cattle, fee), Ur (urus, wild ox), Thorn (thorn), Hagl (hail), Nead (need), and so on, for F, U, Th, H, N, etc., this English list corresponding in great measure with those belong- ing to the Scandinavian and German forms of the Bunic alpha- bet. Again, in the old Slavonic alphabet, the names of Dobro, (good), Zemlja (land), Liode (people), Slovo (word), are given to D, Z, L, S. PICTUEE- WRITING AND WORD- WRITING. 103 If it be granted that there is an amount of resemblance between the letters and their names in the old Semitic alpha- bets, which is wanting in these later ones, it does not follow from thence that the shape of the Hebrew letters was taken from their names. Letters may be named in two ways, acro- stically, by names chosen because they begin with the right letters, or descriptively, as when we speak of certain characters as pothooks and hangers. A combination of the two methods, by choosing out of the words beginning with the proper letter such as had also some suitability to describe its shape, would produce much such a result as we see in the names of the Hebrew letters, and would moreover serve a direct object in helping children to learn them. It is easy to choose such names in English, as Arch or Arrowhead for A, Bow or Butterfly for B, Curve or Crescent for C ; and we may even pick out of the Hebrew lexicon other names which fit about as well as the present set. Whatever may be the real origin,, syllabic or other, of the Semitic characters, the argument so confidently put forth in the Hebrew grammars is not strong enough for the weight laid upon it, seeing that the coincidences on which it rests may be explained as being not primary and essential, but secondary and superficial. The list of names of letters, Aleph, Beth, Gimel, and the rest, is certainly a very ancient and interesting record; but its value may lie not in its taking us back to the pictorial origin of the Hebrew letters, but in its preserving for us among the Semitic race the earliest known version of the " A was an Archer." Mr. Samuel Sharpe has made an attempt to derive the Hebrew letters from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and in his list there are cer- tainly two letters, both also belonging to the Coptic supple- ment, namely, / and sh, which run through the whole series of hieroglyphic, hieratic, Phoenician, old and new Hebrew (in Yau and Shin), in very similar forms, a point which deserves careful investigation. 1 With respect to these speculations, however, it may be suggested that, though it is likely enough that the Jews or Phoenicians may have got the art of writing from the Egyptians, whose possession of it is proved to go back to so 1 Sharpe, ' Egyptian Hieroglyphics j' London, 1861, p. 17. 104 PICTUEE- WRITING AND WORD- WRITING. early a period, it does not necessarily follow from such a sup- position that the characters of their alphabet should be trace- able, letter for letter, to Egyptian originals. The possibility of one people getting the art of writing from another, without .^taking the characters they used for particular letters, is not a matter of theory, but of fact. Two systems of letters, or ra- ther of characters representing syllables, have been invented in modern times, by men who had got the idea of represent- ing sound by written characters, from seeing the books of ci- vilized men, and applied it in their own way to their own lan- guages. Some forty years ago a halfbreed Cherokee Indian, named Sequoyah (otherwise George Guess), invented an ingenious system of writing his language in syllabic signs, which were adopted by the missionaries, and came into common use. In the table given by Schoolcraft there are eighty-five such signs, in great part copied or modified from those Sequoyah had learnt from print ; but the letter D is to be read a ; the letter M, lu ; the figure 4, se ; and so on through R, T, i, A, and a number more. 1 The syllabic system invented by a West African negro, Momoru Doalu Bukere, that is to say, Mohammed Doalu the Bookman, was found in use in the Vei country, . about fifteen years since. 2 When Europeans inquired into its origin, Doalu said that the invention was revealed to him in a dream by a tall venerable white man in a long coat, who said he was sent by other white men to bring him a book, and who taught him some characters to write words with. Doalu awoke, but never learnt what the book was about. So he called his friends to- gether, and one of them afterwards had another dream, in which a white man appeared to him, and told him that the book had come from God. It appears that Doalu, when he was a boy, had really seen a white missionary, and had learnt verses from the English Bible from him, so that it is pretty clear that the sight of a printed book gave him the original idea which he worked out into his very complete and original phonetic 1 Schoolcraft, part ii. p. 228. Bastian, vol. i. p. 423. 2 Koelfe, ' Grammar of the Yei Language ;' London, 1854, p. 229, etc. PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 105 system. It is evident from Fig. 13 that some part of the cha- racters he adopted were taken, of course without any reference 2 b B £,T, K I \Jl ~jjJ~H, be fen aba abe wile no, po re{le\ Fig. 13. to their sound, from the letters he had seen in print. His system numbers 162 characters, representing mostly syllables, as a, be, bo, dso, fen, gba ; but sometimes longer articulations, as sell, sediya, taro. Though it is almost entirely and purely phonetic, it is interesting to observe that it includes three ge- nuine picture - signs, o o gba, " money -," ° bu, " gun/' (re- presented by bullets,) and *~*y* eld, " water," this last sign being identical with that which stands for water in the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It appears from these facts that the transmission of the art of writing does not necessarily involve a detailed transmission of the particular signs in use, and the difficulty in tracing the origin of the Semitic characters may result from their having been formed, in great part or wholly, in the same way as the American and African syliabaria. If this be the case, there is an end of all hope of tracing them any further. In conclusion, it may be observed that the art of picture- writing soon dwindles away in all countries when word -writing is introduced ; yet there are a few isolated forms in which it holds its own, in spite of writing and printing, at this very- day. The so-called Roman numerals are still in use, and | 1 1 1 1 1 are as plain and indisputable picture-writing as any sign on an Indian scroll of birch-bark. Why V an d X mean five and ten is not so clear, but there is some evidence in favour of the view that it may have come by counting fingers or strokes up to nine, and then making a stroke with another across to mark it, somewhat as the deaf-and-dumb Massieu tells us that, in his untaught state, his fingers taught him to count up to ten, and then he made a mark. Loskiel, the Mo- ravian missionary, says of the Iroquois, " They count up to ten, 106 PICTUEE- WETTING AND WOED-WEITING. and make a cross ; then ten again, and so on, till they have finished; then they take the tens together, and make with them hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands." 1 A more modern observer says of the distant tribe of the Creeks, that they reckon by tens, and that in recording on grave -posts the years of age of the deceased, the scalps he has taken, or the war-parties he has led, they make perpendicular strokes for units, and a cross for ten. 2 The Chinese character for ten is an upright cross ; and in an old Chinese account of the life of Christ, it is said that " they made a very large and heavy ma- chine of wood, resembling the character ten," which he carried, and to which he was nailed. 3 The Egyptians, in their hiero- glyphic character, counted by upright strokes up to nine, and then made a special sign for ten, in this respect resembling the modern Creek Indians ; and the fact that the Chinese only count | || 1 1 1 in strokes, and go on with an X for four, and then with various other symbols till they come to + or ten, does not interfere with the fact, that in three or four systems of numeration, so far as we know independent of one another, in Italy, China, and North America, more or less of the earlier numerals are indicated by counted strokes, and ten by a crossed stroke. Such an origin for the Eoman X is quite consistent with a half X or V, being used for five, to save making a num- ber of strokes which would be difficult to count at a glance. 4 However this may be, the pictorial origin of | 1 1 1 1 1 is be- yond doubt. And in technical writing, such terms as T-square and S-h°°k;, and phrases such as " © before clock 4 min.," and " ]) rises at 8h. 35m.," survive to show that even in the midst of the highest European civilization, the spirit of the earliest and rudest form of writing is not yet quite extinct. 1 Loskiel, Gesch. der Mission der evangelischen Briider ; Barby, 1789, p. 39. 2 Schoolcraft, part i. p. 273. 3 Davis, 'The Chinese ;' London, 1851, vol. ii. p. 176. 4 A dactylic origin of V, as being a rude figure of the open hand, with thumb stretched out, and fingers close together, succeeding the I II III 1 1 1 1 , made with the upright fingers, has been propounded by Grotefend, and has occurred to others. It is plausible, but wants actual evidence. 107 CHAPTER VI. IMAGES AND NAMES. The trite comparison of savages to ' ' grown-up children," is in the main a sound one, though not to be carried out too strictly. In the uncivilized American or Polynesian, the strength of body and force of character of a grown man are combined with a mental development in many respects not beyond that of a young child of a civilized race. It has been already noticed how naturally children can appreciate and understand such direct expressions of thought as the gesture-language and pic- ture-writing. In like manner, the use of dolls or images as an assistance to the operations of the mind, is familiar to all chil- dren, though among those who grow up under the influences of civilized society, it is mostly superseded and forgotten in after life. Few educated Europeans ever thoroughly realize the fact, that they have once passed through a condition of mind from which races at a lower stage of civilization never fully emerge ; but this is certainly the case, and the European child playing with its doll, furnishes the key to several of the mental phenomena which distinguish the more highly cultivated races of mankind from those lower in the scale. When a child plays with a doll or plaything, the toy is com- monly made to represent in the child's mind some imaginary object which is more or less like it. Wooden soldiers, for in- stance, or the beasts in a Noah's ark, have a real resemblance which any one would recognize at once to soldiers and beasts, 108 IMAGES AND NAMES. and all that the child has to do is to suppose them bigger, and alive, and to consider them as walking of themselves when they are pushed about. But an imaginative child will be con- tent with much less real resemblance than this. It will bring in a larger subjective element, and make a dog do duty for a horse, or a soldier for a shepherd, till at last the objective re- semblance almost disappears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, representing a ship on the sea, or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a ship or a coach is very slight indeed ; but it is a thing, and can be moved about in an appropriate manner, and placed in a suitable position with respect to other objects. Unlike as the toy may be to what it represents in the child's mind, it still answers a pur- pose, and is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it to arrange and develope its ideas, by working the objects and actions and stories it is acquainted with, into a series of dra- matic pictures. Of how much use the material object is in set- ting the mind to work, may be seen by taking it away and leav- ing the child to play, with nothing to play with. At an early age, children learn more from play than from teaching ; and the use of toys is very great in developing their minds by giving them the means of, as it were, taking a scene or an event to pieces, and putting its parts together in new combinations, a process which immensely increases the defi- niteness of the children's ideas and their power of analysis. It is because the use of toys is principally in developing the sub- jective side of the mind, that the elaborate figures and models of which the toy-shops have been full of late years are of so little use. They are carefully worked out into the nicest de- tails; but they are models or pictures, not playthings, and children, who know quite well what it is they want, tire of them in a few hours, unless, indeed, they can break them up and make real toys of the bits. What a child wants is not one picture, but the means of making a thousand. Objective know- ledge, such as is to be gained from the elaborate doll's houses and grocer's shops, with their appurtenances, may be got in plenty elsewhere by mere observation ; but toys, to be of value in early education, should be separate, so as to allow of their IMAGES AND NAMES. 109 being arranged in any variety of combination, and not too ser- vile and detailed copies of objects, so that they may not be mere pictures, but symbols, which a child can make to stand for many objects with the aid of its imagination. In later years, and among highly educated people, the men- tal process which goes on in a child playing with wooden sol- diers and horses, though it never disappears, must be sought for in the midst of more complex phenomena. Perhaps no- thing in after life more closely resembles the effect of a doll upon a child, than the effect of the illustrations of a tale upon a grown-up reader. Here the objective resemblance is very indefinite ; two artists would make pictures of the same scene that were very unlike one another, the very persons and places depicted are imaginary, and yet what reality and definiteness is given to the scene by a good picture. But in this case the direct action of an image on the mind complicates itself with the deepest problems of painting and sculpture. The com- parison of the workings of the mind of the uncivilized man, and of the civilized child, is much less difficult. Mr. Backhouse one day noticed in Van Diemen's Land a native woman arranging several stones that were flat, oval, and about two inches wide, and marked in various directions with black and red lines. These he learned represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest stood for a fat native woman on Flinders Island, known by the name of Mother Brown. 1 Similar practices are found among far higher races than the ill-fated Tasmanians. Among some North American tribes, a mother who has lost a child keeps its memory ever present to her by filling its cradle with black feathers and quills, and carrying it about with her for a year or more. When she stops anywhere, she sets up the cradle and talks to it as she goes about her work, just as she would have done if the dead baby had been still alive within it. 2 Here we have no image; but in Africa we find a rude doll, representing the child, kept as a memorial. It is well known that over a great 1 Backhouse, ' Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies ; ' London, 1843, p. 104. 2 Catlin, vol. ii. p. 133. 110 IMAGES AND NAMES. part of Africa the practice prevails, that whenever twin chil- dren are born, one or both of them are immediately killed. Among the Wanyamwezi, one of the two is always killed ; and, strange to say, " the universal custom amongst these tribes, is for the mother to wrap a gourd or calabash in skins, to place it to sleep with, and feed it like, the survivor." 1 Among the Be- chuanas, it is a custom for married women to carry a doll with them till they have a child, when the doll is discarded. There is one of these dolls in the London Missionary Museum, con- sisting simply of a long calabash, like a bottle, wound round with strings of beads. The Basuto women use clay dolls in the same way, giving them the names of tutelary deities, and treat- ing them as children. 2 Among the Ostyaks of Eastern Si- beria, there is found a still more instructive case, in which we see the transition from the image of the dead man to the actual idol. When a man dies, they set up a rude wooden image of him, which receives offerings and has honours paid to it, and the widow embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these images are buried at the end of three years or so, but some- times the image of a shaman 3 is set up permanently, and re- mains as a saint for ever. 4 The principal use of images to races in the lower stages of civilization is that to which their name of ' ' the visible," elScoXov, idol, has come to be in great measure restricted in modern lan- guage. The idol answers to the savage in one province of thought the same purpose that its analogue the doll does to the child. It enables him to give a definite existence and a personality to the vague ideas of higher beings, which his mind can hardly grasp without some material aid. How these ideas came into the minds of even the lowest savages, need not be discussed here ; it is sufficient to know that, so far as we have accurate information, they seem to be present everywhere in at least a rudimentary state. 1 Burton, e Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 23. 2 Casalis, p. 251. 3 A shaman is a native sorcerer or medicine-man. His name is corrupted from Sanskrit cramana, a Buddhist ascetic, a term which is one of the many relics of Buddhism in Northern Asia, having been naturalized into the grovelling fetish- worship of the Ostyaks and Tunguzes. See Weber, ' Indische Skizzen,' p. 66. 4 Erman, ' Beise urn die Erde ; ' Berlin, 1833-48, vol. ii. p. 677. IMAGES AND NAMES. Ill It does not appear that idols accompany religious ideas down to the lowest levels of the human race, but rather that they be- long to a period of transition and growth. At least this seems the only reasonable explanation of the fact, that in America, for instance, among the lowest races, the Fuegians and the Indians of the southern forests, we hear little or nothing of idols. Among the so-called Red Indians of the North, we sometimes find idols worshipped and sacrificed to, but not com- monly, while in Mexico and Peru the whole apparatus of idols, temples, priests, and sacrifices is found in a most complex and elaborate form. It does not seem, indeed, that the growth of the use of images may be taken as any direct measure of the growth of religious ideas, which is complicated with a multi- tude of other things. But it seems that when man has got some way in developing the religious element in him, he begins to catch at the device of setting a puppet or a stone as the symbol and representative of the notions of a higher being which are floating in his mind. He sees in it, as a child does in a doll, a material form which his imagination can clothe with all the attributes of a being which he has never seen,. but of whose existence and nature he judges by what he supposes to be its works. He can lodge it in the place of honour, cover it up in the most precious garments, propitiate it with offerings such as would be acceptable to himself. The Christian mis- sionary goes among the heathen to teach the doctrines of a higher religion, and to substitute for the crude superstition of the savage a belief in a God so far beyond human comprehen- sion, that no definition of the Deity is possible to man beyond vague predications, as of infinite power, duration, knowledge, and goodness. It is not- perhaps to be. wondered at, that the missionary should see nothing in idol-worship but hideous folly and wickedness, and should look upon an idol as a special in- vention of the devil. He is strengthened, moreover, in such a view by the fact that by the operation of a certain law of the human mind (of which more will be said presently), the idol, which once served a definite and important purpose in the edu- cation of the human race, has come to be confounded with the idea of which it was the symbol, and has thus become the parent 112 IMAGES AND NAMES. of the grossest superstition and delusion. But the student who occupies himself in tracing the early stages of human civilization, can see in the rude image of the savage an impor- tant aid to early religious development, while it often happens that the missionary is as unable to appreciate the use and value of an idol, as the grown-up man is to realize the use of a doll to a child. Man being the highest living creature that can be seen and imitated, it is natural that idols should mostly be imitations, more or less rude, of the human form. To show that the beings they represent are greater and more powerful than man, they are often huge in size, and sometimes, by a very natural expe- dient, several heads and pairs of arms and legs show that they have more wisdom, strength, and swiftness than man. The sun and moon, which, in the physical system of the savage, are often held to be living creatures of monstrous power, are re- presented by images. The lower animals, too, are often raised to the honour of personating supernatural powers, a practice which need not surprise us, when we consider that the savage does not set the lower animals at so great a depth below him as the civilized man does, but allows them the possession of language, and after his fashion, of souls, while we perhaps err in the opposite direction, by stretching the great gap which separates the lowest man from the highest animal, into an im- passable gulf. Moreover, as animals nave some powers which man only possesses in a less degree, or not at all, these powers may be attributed to a deity by personating him under the forms of the animals which possess them, or by giving to an image of human form parts of such animals ; thus the feet of a stag, the head of a lion, or the wings of a bird, may serve to express the swiftness or ferocity of a god, or to show that he can fly into the upper regions of the air, or, like the goat's feet of Pan, they may be mere indications of his character and func- tions. It is not necessary that the figure of a deity should have the characteristics of the race who worship it ; the figure of another race may seem fitter for the purpose. Mr. Catlin, for instance, brought over with him a tent from the Crow Indians, which he IMAGES AND NAMES. 113 describes as having the Great or Good Spirit painted on one side of it, and the Bad Spirit on the other. His drawing, un- fortunately, only shows clearly one figure, in the unmistakable uniform of a white soldier with a musket in the one hand and a pipe in the other, 1 and this may very likely be the figure of the Good Spirit, for the pipe is a known symbol of peace. 2 But the white man stands also to the savage painter for the portrait of the Evil Demon, especially in Africa, where we find the natives of Mozambique drawing their devil in the likeness of a white man, 3 while Komer, speaking of the people of the Guinea coast, says that they say the devil is white, and paint him with their whitest colours. The pictures of him are lent on hire for a week or so by the old woman who makes them, to people whom the devil visits at night. When he sees his image, he is so terrified that he never comes back. 4 This impersonation need not, however, be intended by any means as an insult to the white man. As Captain Burton says of his African name of Muzungu Mbaya, " the wicked white man," it would have been but a sorry compliment to have called him a good white man. Much of the reverence of the savage is born rather of fear than of love, and the white colonist has seldom failed to make out that title to the respect of the savage, which lies in the power, not unaccompanied by the will, to hurt him. The rudeness and shapelessness of some of the blocks and stones which serve as idols among many tribes, and those not always the lowest, is often surprising. There seems to be but one limit to the shapelessness of an idol, which is yet to repre- sent the human form, and this is the same which a child would unconsciously apply, namely, that its length, breadth, and thickness must bear a proportion not too far different from the proportions of the human body. A wooden brick or a cotton- reel, set up or lying down, will serve well enough for a child to 1 Catlin, vol. i. p. 44. 2 Sir G-. Simpson, Narrative of a Journey round the World ; London, 1847, vol. i. p. 75. 3 Purchas, vol. v. p. 758. See Livingstone, Missionary Travels, etc., in South Africa j London, 1857, p. 465. 4 L. F. Komer, Nachr. von der Kiiste Guinea's j Copenhagen, Leipzig, 1769, p. 43. I 114 IMAGES AND NAMES. represent a man or woman standing or lying, but a cube or a ball would not answer the purpose so well, and if put for a man, could hardly be supposed even by the imagination of a child, to represent more than position and movement, or rela- tive size when compared with larger or smaller objects. Much the same test is applied by the uncivilized man in a particular class of myths or legends, which come to be made on this wise. We all have more or less of the power of seeing forms of men and animals in inanimate objects, which sometimes have in fact a considerable likeness of outline to what they suggest, but which, in some instances, have scarcely any other resemblance to the things into which fancy shapes them, than a rough similarity in the proportions of their longer and shorter diameters. Myths which have been applied to such fancied resemblances, or have grown up out of them, may be collected from all parts of the world, and from races high and low in the scale of culture. Among the Biccaras, there was once a young Indian who was in love with a girl, but her parents refused their consent to the marriage, so the youth went out into the prairie, lamenting his fate, and the girl wandered out to the same place, and the faithful dog followed his master. There they wandered with nothing to live on but the wild grapes, and at last they were turned into stone, first their feet, and then gradually the upper part of their bodies, till at last nothing was left unchanged but a bunch of grapes, which the girl holds in her hand to this day. And all this story has grown out of the fancied likeness of three stones to two human figures and a dog. There are many grapes growing near, and the Biccaras venerate these figures, leaving little offerings for them when they pass by. 1 There was a Maori warrior named Hau, and his wife Wairaka deserted him. So he followed her, going from one river to the next, and at last he came to one, where he looked out slyly from the corner of his eye to see if he could discover her. He breathed hard when he reached the place where Wairaka was sitting with her paramour. He said to her, " Wairaka, I am thirsty, fetch me some water/' She got up and walked down to the sea with a calabash in each hand. He made her go on 1 Lewis and Clarke, Expedition ; Philadelphia, 1814, p. 107. IMAGES AND NAMES. 115 until the waves flowed over her shoulders, when he repeated a charm, which converted her into a rock that still bears her name. Then he went joyfully on his way. 1 So the figure of the weeping Niobe turned into a rock, might be seen on Mount Sipylus. 2 So the circles of upright stones, set up long ago, on downs and hilltops in England and else- where, we cannot tell certainly for what purpose, have sug- gested the idea of a ring-dance, and the story has shaped itself, perhaps in Puritan times, that such a ring was a party of girls who were turned into stone for dancing carols on a Sunday. There is a tradition, probably still current in Palestine, of a city between Petra and Hebron, whose inhabitants were turned into stone for their wickedness. This tradition may have been embodied in the Arabian Nights story of the city of fire-wor- shippers, who refused to embrace Islam, and were turned into stone. Seetzen, the traveller, visited the spot where the re- mains of the petrified inhabitants of the wicked city are still to be seen, and he found their heads, a number of stony con- cretions, lying scattered on the ground. 3 The myths of footprints stamped into the rock by gods or mighty men are not the least curious of this class, not only from the power of imagination required to see footprints in mere round or long cavities, but also from the unanimity with which Egyptians, Greeks, Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, and Moslems have adopted them as relics, each from their own point of view. The typical case is the sacred footprint of Ceylon, which is a cavity in the rock, 5 feet long by 2 J feet wide, at the top of Adam's Peak, made into something like a huge footstep by mortar divisions for the toes. Brahmans, Buddhists, and Moslems still climb the mountain to do re- verence to it ; but to the Brahman it is the footstep of Siva, to the Buddhist of the great founder of his religion, Gautama Buddha, and to the Moslem it is the spot where Adam stood when he was driven from Paradise; while the Gnostics have 1 W. B. Baker, On Maori Popular Poetry, Trans. Eth. Soc. ; London, 1861, p. 49. 2 Pausanias, i. 21. 3 Kenrick, ■ Essay on Primaeval History ; ' London, 1846, p. 41, i2 116 IMAGES AND NAMES. held it to be the footprint of leu, and Christians have been divided between the conflicting claims of St. Thomas and the Eunuch of Candace, Queen of Ethiopia. 1 The followers of these different faiths have found holy footprints in many coun- tries of the Old World, and the Christians have carried the idea into various parts of Europe, where saints have left their footmarks ; while, even in America, St. Thomas left his foot- steps on the shores of Bahia, as a record of his mythic journey. 2 For all we know, the whole mass of the Old World footprint- myths may have had but a single origin, and have travelled from one people to another. The story is found, too, in the Pacific Islands, for in Samoa two hollow places, near six feet long, in a rock, are shown as the footprints of Tiitii, where he stood when he pushed the heavens up from the earth. 3 But there are reasons which may make us hesitate to consider the great Polynesian mythology as independent of Asiatic in- fluence. Even in North America, at the edge of the Great Pipestone Quarry, where the Great Spirit stood when the blood of the buffalos he was devouring ran down upon the stone and turned it red, there his footsteps are to be seen deeply marked in the rock, in the form of the track of a great bird. 4 There are three kinds of prints in the rock which may have served as a foundation for such tales as these. In many parts of the world there are fossil footprints of birds and beasts, many of huge size. The North American Indians also, whose attention is specially alive to the footprints of men and animals, very often carve them on rocks, sometimes with figures of the animals to which they belong. These footprints are some- times so naturally done as to be mistaken for real ones. The rock of which Andersson heard in South Africa, M in which the tracks of all the different animals indigenous to the country 1 Tennent, ' Ceylon ;' vol. ii. p. 132. Scherzer, Toy. of the Novara, E. Tr.j Lon- don, 1861, etc., vol. i. p. 413. 2 Southey, ' History of Brazil ;' London, 1822, vol. i. ; Sup. p. xx. 3 Eev. Or. Turner, ■ Nineteen Years in Polynesia j' London, 1861, p. 245. 4 Catlin, vol. ii. p. 165, etc. IMAGES AND NAMES. 117 are distinctly visible/' 1 is probably such a sculptured rock. Thirdly, there are such mere shapeless holes as those to which most or all of the Old World myths seem to be attached. Now the difficulty in working out the problem of the origin of these myths is this, that if the prints are real fossil ones, or good sculptures, stories of the beings that made them might grow up independently anywhere; but one can hardly fancy men in many different places coming separately upon the quaint notion of mere hollows, six feet long, being monstrous footprints, unless the notion of monstrous footprints being found elsewhere were already current. At the foot of the page are references to some passages relating to the subject. 2 It has just been remarked that there is a certain process of the human mind through which, among men at a low level of education, the use of images leads to gross superstition and delusion. No one will deny that there is an evident connexion between an object, and an image or picture of it ; but we ci- vilized men know well that this connexion is only subjective, that is, in the mind of the observer, while there is no objective connexion between them. By an objective connexion, I mean such a connexion as there is between the bucket in the well and the hand that draws it up, — when the hand stops, the bucket stops too ; or between a man and his shadow, —when the man moves, the shadow moves too; or between an electro- magnet and the iron filings near it, — when the current passes through the coil, a change takes place in the condition of the iron filings. These are, of course, crude examples; but if more nicety is necessary, it might be said that the connexion is in some degree what a mathematician expresses in saying that y is a function of x, when, if x changes, y changes too. The connexion between a man and his portrait is not objec- tive, for what is done to the man has no effect upon the portrait, and vice versa. 1 C. J. Andersson, Lake Ngami, etc., p. 327. 2 Lyell, Second Visit to IT. S. ; London, 1850, vol. ii. p. 313. C. Hamilton Smith, Nat. Hist, of Human Species ; Edinburgh, 1848, p. 35. Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 74. Burton, ' Central Africa ;' vol. i. p. 288. Squier and Davis, Anct. Mon. of Mssi, Valley, vol. i. of Smithsonian Contr.; Washington, 1848, p. 293. Kawlinson, Herodotus: book ii. 91. iv. 82. 118 IMAGES AND NAMES, To an educated European nowadays this sounds like a mere truism, so self-evident that it is not necessary to make a formal statement of it ; but it may nevertheless be shown that this is one of the cases in which the accumulated experience and the long course of education of the civilized races, have brought them not only to'reverse the opinion of the savage, but com- monly to think that their own views are the only ones that could naturally arise in the mind of any rational human being. It needs no very large acquaintance with the life and ways of thought of the savage, to prove that there is to be found all over the world, especially among races at a low mental level, a view as to this matter which is very different from that which a more advanced education has impressed upon us. Man, in a low stage of culture, very commonly believes that between the object and the image of it there is a real connexion, which does not arise from a mere subjective process in the mind of the observer, and that it is accordingly possible to communicate an impression to the original through the copy. We may follow this erroneous belief up into periods of high civilization, its traces becoming fainter as education advances, and not only is this confusion of subjective and objective relation the prime cause of most of the delusions of idolatry, but even so seemingly obscure a subject as magic and sorcery may be brought in great measure into clear daylight, by looking at it as evolved from this process of the mind. It is related by an early observer of the natives of Australia, that in one of their imitative dances they made use of a grass - figure of a kangaroo, and the ceremony was held to give them power over the real kangaroos in the bush. 1 In Nortb America, when an Algonquin wizard wishes to kill a particular animal, he makes a grass or cloth image of it, and hangs it up in his wigwam. Then he repeats several times the incantation, " See how I shoot," and lets fly an arrow at the image. If he drives it in, it is a sign that the animal will be killed next day. Again, while an arrow touched by the magical medawin, and after- wards fired into the track of an animal, is believed to arrest his course, or otherwise affect him, till the hunter can come 1 Collins, ■ New South Wales ;' London, 1798, vol. i. p. 569. IMAGES AND NAMES. 119 up, a similar virtue is believed to be exerted, if but the figure of the animal sought be drawn on wood or bark, and after- wards submitted to the influences of the magic medicine and incantation. 1 In their picture-writings, a man or beast is shown to be under magic influence by drawing a line from the mouth to the heart, as in the annexed figure, which represents a wolf under the charm of the magician, and corresponds to the incantation sung by the medicine- man, "Kun, wolf, your body's mine." 2 Writing in the last cen- tury, Charlevoix remarks, that the Illinois and some other tribes make little marmouzets or pup- pets to represent those whose lives they wish to shorten, and pierce these images to the heart. 2 We find thus among the Indians of North America one of the commonest arts of magic practised in Europe in ancient and mediaeval times. The art of making an image and melt- ing it away, drying it up, shooting at it, sticking pins or thorns into it, that some like injury may befall the person it is to re- present, is too well known to need detailed description here, 3 and it is still to be found existing in various parts of the world. Thus the Peruvian sorcerers are said still to make rag dolls and stick cactus-thorns into them, and to hide them in secret holes in houses, or in the wool of beds or cushions, thereby to cripple people, or turn them sick or mad. 4 In Borneo the familiar European practice still exists, of making a wax figure of the enemy to be bewitched, whose body is to waste away as the image is gradually melted, 5 as in the story of Margery Jordane's waxen image of Henry VI. The Hindoo arts are thus de- scribed by the Abbe Dubois : — " They knead earth taken from the sixty-four most unclean places, with hair, clippings of hair, 1 Schoolcraft, part i. pp. 372, 380-382. 2 Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 88. 3 Jacoh Grimm, ' Deutsche Mythologie,' Gottingen, 3rd edit.; 1854, p. 1045, etc Brand, ■ Popular Antiquities,' Bohn's Series ; London, 1855, vol. iii. p. 10, etc. 4 Kivero and Tschudi, p. 181. 5 St. John, vol. ii. p. 260. 120 IMAGES AND NAMES. bits of leather, etc., and with this they make little figures, on the breasts of which they write the name of the enemy ; over these they pronounce magical words and mantrams, and conse- crate them by sacrifices. No sooner is this done, than the grahas, or planets, seize the hated person, and inflict on him a thousand ills. They sometimes pierce these figures right through with an awl, or cripple them in different ways, with the intention of killing or crippling in reality the object of their vengeance." 1 Again, the Karens of Burmah model an image of a person from the earth of his footprints, and stick it over with cottonseeds, intending thereby to strike the person re- presented with dumbness. 3 Here we have the making of the figure combined with the ancient practice in Germany known as the "earth- cutting" (erdschnitt), cutting out the earth or turf where the man who is to be destroyed has stood, and hanging it in the chimney, that he may perish as his footprint dries and shrivels. 3 In these cases the object in view is to hurt the original through the image, but it is also possible to make an image, transfer to it the evil spirit of the disease which has attacked the person it is to represent, and then send it out like a scape- goat into the wilderness. They conjure devils into puppets in West Africa; 4 in Siam the doctor makes an image of clay, sends his patient's disease into it, and then takes it away to the woods and buries it ; 8 while the Tunguz cures his leg or his heart by wearing a carved model of the part affected about him. 6 The transfer of life or the qualities of a living being to an image may be made by giving it a name, or by the performance of a ceremony over it. Thus, at the festival of the Durga Puja, the officiating Brahman touches the cheeks, eyes, breast, and fore- head of each of the images that have been prepared, and says, "Let the soul of Durga long continue in happiness in this image." 1 Dubois, Moeurs, etc., des Peuples de l'lnde ; Paris, 1825, vol. ii. p. 63. 2 Mrs. Mason, 'Civilizing Mountain Men;' London, 1862, p. 121. 3 Grimm, D. M., p. 1047. 4 Hutchinson, in Tr. Eth. Soc. ; London, 1861, p. 336. 5 Bowring, 'Siam ;' London, 1857, vol. i. p. 139. 6 Ravenstein, * The Russians on the Amur ;' London, 1861, p. 351. IMAGES AND NAMES. 121 Till life is thus given to them, they may not be worshipped. 1 But the mere making of the image of a living creature is very commonly sufficient to set up at once its connexion with life, among races who have not thoroughly passed out of the state of mind to which these practices belong. Looking at the matter from a very different point of view, and yet with the same feeling of a necessary connexion between life and the image of the living creature, the Moslem holds that he who makes an image in this world will have it set before him on the day of judgment, and will be called upon to give it life, but he will fail to finish the work he has thus left half done, and will be sent to expiate his offence in hell. With such illustrations to show how widely spread and deeply rooted is the belief that there is a real connexion be- tween the object and its image, we can see how almost in- evitable it is, that the man at a low stage of education should come to confound the image with that which it was made to represent. The strong craving of the human mind for a ma- terial support to the religious sentiment, has produced idols and fetishes over most parts of the world, and at most periods in its history ; and while the more intelligent, even among many low tribes, have often seen clearly enough that the images were mere symbols of superhuman beings, the vulgar have com- monly believed that the idols themselves had life and super- natural powers. Missionaries have remarked this difference in the views of more and less intelligent members of the same tribe ; and it is emphatically true of a large part of Christen- dom, that the images and pictures, which, to the more in- structed, serve merely as a help to realize religious ideas and to suggest devotional thoughts, are looked upon by the unedu- cated and superstitious crowd, as beings endowed not only with a sort of life, but with miraculous influences. The line between the cases in which the connexion between object and figure is supposed to be real, and those in which it is known to be imaginary, is often very difficult to draw. Thus idols and figures of saints are beaten and abused for not grant- ing the prayers of their worshippers, which may be a mere 1 Coleman, « The Mythology of the Hindus ;' London, 1832, p. 83. 122 IMAGES AND NAMES. expression of spite towards their originals, but then two rival gods may be knocked together when their oracles disagree, that the one which breaks first may be discarded, and here a material connection must certainly be supposed to exist. To the most difficult class belong the symbolic sacrifices of models of men and animals in Italy and Greece, and the economical paper-offerings of Eastern Asia. The Chinese perform the rite of burning money and clothes for the use of the dead j but the real things are too valuable to be wasted by a thrifty people, so paper figures do duty for them. Thus they set burning junks adrift as sacrifices to get a favourable wind, but they are only paper ones. Perhaps the neatest illustration of this kind of offerings, and of the state of mind in which the offerer makes them, is to be found in Hue and Gabet's story of the Tibetan lamas, who sent horses flying from the mountain-top in a gale of wind, for the relief of worn-out pilgrims who could get no further on their way. The horses were bits of paper, with a horse printed on each, saddled, bridled, and galloping at full speed. 1 Hanging and burning in effigy is a proceeding which, in civilized countries at any rate, at last comes fairly out into pure symbolism. The idea that the burning of the straw and rag body should act upon the body of the original, perhaps hardly comes into the mind of any one who assists at such a perform- ance. But it is not easy to determine how far this is the case with the New Zealanders, whose minds are full of confusion between object and image, as we may see by their witchcraft, and who also hold strong views about their effigies, and fero- ciously revenge an insult to them. One very curious practice has come out of their train of thought about this matter. They were very fond of wearing round their necks little hideous figures of green jade, with their heads very much on one side, which are called tiki, and are often to be seen in museums. It seems likely that they are merely images of Tiki, the god of the dead. They are carried as memorials of dead friends, and are sometimes taken off and wept and sung over by a circle of natives ; but a tiki commonly belongs, not to the memory of a 1 Hue and Gabet, Voy. dans la Tartaric, etc.; Paris, 1850, vol. ii. p. 136. IMAGES AND NAMES. 123 single individual, but of a succession of deceased persons who have worn it in their time, so that it cannot be considered as having in it much of the nature of a portait. 1 Some New Zea- landers, however, who were lately in London, were asked why these tikis usually, if not always, have but three fingers on their hands, and they replied that if an image is made of a man, and any one should insult it, the affront would have to be revenged, and to avoid such a contingency the tikis were made with only three fingers, so that, not being any one's image, no one was bound to notice what happened to them. In medicine, the notion of the real connexion between object and image has manifested itself widely in both ancient and modern times. Pliny speaks of the folly of the magicians in using the catanance (kcltclv ay kt], compulsion) for love-potions, because it shrinks in drying into the shape of the claws of a dead kite (and so, of course, holds the patient fast) ; but it does not strike him that the virtues of the lithospermum or " stone-seed " in curing calculus were no doubt deduced in just the same way. 2 In more modern times, such notions as these were elaborated into the old medical theory known as the "Doctrine of Signatures," which supposed that plants and minerals indicated by their external characters the diseases for which nature had intended them as remedies. Thus the Eu- phrasia or eye-bright was, and is, supposed to be good for the eyes, on the strength of a black pupil-like spot in its corolla, the yellow turmeric was thought good for jaundice, and the blood-stone is probably used to this day for stopping blood. 3 By virtue of a similar association of ideas, the ginseng, which is still largely used in China, was also employed by the Indians of North America, and in both countries its virtues were de- duced from the shape of the root, which is supposed to re- semble the human body. Its Iroquois name, abesoutckenza, means " a child," while in China it is called jin-seng, that is to say, "resemblance of man." 4 1 Hale, in U. S. Exploring Exp. ; Philadelphia, vol. vi., 1846, p. 23. Eev. W. Yate, ' Account of New Zealand ;' London, 1835, p. 151. 2 Plin., xxvii. 35, 74. 3 Paris, ' Pharmacologia ;' London, 1843, p. 47. 4 Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 24. For a similar case, see the ' Penny Cyclopaedia,' art. " Atropa Mandragora " (mandrake). 124 IMAGES AND NAMES. Such cases as these bring clearly into view the belief in a real and material connexion existing between an object and its image. By virtue of their resemblance, the two are associated in thought, and being thus brought into connexion in the mind, it comes to be believed that they are also in connexion in the outside world. Now the association of an object with its name is made in a very different way, but it nevertheless pro- duces a series of very similar results. Except in imitative words, the objective resemblance between thing and word, if it ever existed, is not discernible now. A word cannot be compared to an image or a picture, which, as everybody can see, is like what it stands for ; but it is enough that idea and word come together by habit in the mind, to make men think that there is some real bond of connexion between the thing, and the name which belongs to it in their mother-tongue. Professor Lazarus, in his ' ' Life of the Soul," tells a good story of a German who went to the Paris Exhibition, and remarked to his companion what an extraordinary people the French were, " For bread, they say du pain!" "Yes," said the other, "and we say bread." " To be sure," replied the first, " but it is breoA, you know." 1 As, then, men confuse the word and the idea, in much the same way as they confuse the image with that which it repre- sents, there springs up a sst of practices and beliefs concerning names, much like those relating to images. Thus it is thought that the utterance of a word ten miles off has a direct effect on the object which that word stands for. A man may be cursed or bewitched through his name, as well as through his image. You may lay a smock frock on the door-sill, and pronounce over it the name of the man you have a spite against, and then when you beat that smock, your enemy will feel every blow as well as if he were inside it in the flesh. 2 Thus, too, when the root of the dead-nettle was plucked to be worn as a charm against intermittent fevers, it was necessary to say for what purpose, and for whom, and for whose son it was pulled up, 1 Lazarus, 'Leben der Seele;' Berlin, 1856-7, vol. ii. p. 77. 2 Kuhn, 'Die Herabkunft des- Feuers und des Gottertranks;' Berlin, 1559, p. 227. IMAGES AND NAMES. 125 and other magical plants required also a mention of the patient's name to make them work. 1 How the name is held to be part of the very being of the man who bears it, so that by it his personality may be carried away, and, so to speak, grafted elsewhere, appears in the way in which the sorcerer uses it as a means of putting the life of his victim into the image upon which he practises. Thus King James, in his f Dsemonology/ says that u the devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness." 2 A mediaeval sermon speaks of baptizing a "wax" to bewitch with; and in the eleventh century, certain Jews, it was believed, made a waxen image of Bishop Eberhard, set about with tapers, bribed a clerk to baptize it, and set fire to it on that sabbath, the which image burning away at the middle, the bishop fell grievously sick and died. 3 A similar train of thought shows itself in the belief, that the utterance of the name of a deity gives to man a means of direct communication with the being who owns it, or even places in his hands the supernatural power of that being, to be used at his will. The Moslems hold that the u great name " of God (not Allah, which is a mere epithet), is known only to prophets and apostles, who, by pronouncing it, can transport themselves from place to place at will, can kill the living, raise the dead, and do any other miracle. 4 The concealment of the name of the tutelary deity of Home, for divulging which Valerius Soranus is said to have paid the penalty of death, is a case in point. As to the reason of its being kept a secret, Pliny says that Verrius Flaccus quotes authors whom he thinks trustworthy, to the effect that when the Eo- mans laid siege to a town, the first step was for the priests to summon the god under whose guardianship the place was, and to offer him the same or a greater place or worship among the Eomans. This practice, Pliny adds, still remains in the pon- tifical discipline, and it is certainly for this reason that it has 1 Plin., xxii. 16, 24 ; xxiii. 54. 3 Grimm, D. M., p. 1047. 2 Brand, vol. iii. p. 10. 4 Lane, Mod. Eg., vol. i. p. 361. 126 IMAGES AND NAMES. been kept secret under the protection of what god Rome itself has been, lest its enemies should use a like proceeding. 1 Moreover, as man puts himself into communication with spirits through their names, so they know him through his name. In Borneo, they will change the name of a sickly child to deceive the evil spirits that have been tormenting it. 2 In South America, among the Abipones and Lenguas, when a man died, his family and neighbours would change their own names 3 to cheat Death when he should come to look for them. It is perhaps a falling off from these extreme instances of the inti- macy with which name and object have grown together in the savage mind, to cite the practice of exchanging names in evi- dence of identity of mind and feeling, which was found in the West Indies at the time of Columbus, 4 and in the South Seas by Captain Cook, who was called Oree, while his friend Oree went by the name of Cookee. 5 But Cadwallader Colden's account of his new name, is ad- mirable evidence of what there is in a name in the mind of the savage. " The first Time I was among the Mohawks, I had this Compliment from one of their old Sachems, which he did, by giving me his own Name, Gayenderongue. He had been a notable Warrior ; and he told me, that now I had a Right to assume to myself all the Acts of Valour he had performed, and that now my Name would echo from Hill to Hill over all the Five Nations." When Colden went back into the same part ten or twelve years later, he found that he was still known by the name he had thus received, and that the old chief had taken another. 6 Taking a still wider stretch, the power of association grasps not only the spoken word, but its written representative. It 1 Plin., xxviii. 4. Plut., Q. It. Macrob. Sat., iii. 9. See Bayle, art. " Soranus." 2 St. John, • Borneo,' vol. i. p. 197. 3 Dobrizhoffer, 'The Abipones,' E. Tr. ; London, 1822, vol. ii. p. 273. Southey, * History of Brazil ;' London, 1819, vol. iii. p. 394. 4 • Letters of Columbus ' (Hakluyt Soc.) ; London, 1847, p. 217. 5 Cook, First Toy. H., vol. ii. p. 251. Second Voyage j London, 2nd edit., 1777, vol. i. p. 167. 6 Colden, Hist, of the Five Indian Nations of Canada j London, 1747, part i. p. 10. IMAGES AND NAMES. 127 has been seen how the Hindoo sorcerers wrote the name of their victim on the breast of the image made to personate him. A Chinese physician, if he has not got the drug he requires for his patient, will write the prescription on a piece of paper, and let the sick man swallow its ashes, or an infusion of the writing, in water. 1 This practice is no doubt very old, and may even descend from the time when the picture-element in Chinese writing, now almost effaced, was still clearly distin- guishable, so that the patient would at least have the satisfac- tion of eating a picture, not a mere written word. Whether the Moslems got the idea from them or not, I do not know, but among them a verse of the Koran washed off into water and drunk, or even water from a cup in which it is engraved, is an efficacious remedy. 2 Here the connexion between the two ends of the chain is very remote indeed. The arbitrary characters, which represent the sound of the word, which re- presents the idea, have to do duty for the idea itself. The example is a striking one, and will serve to measure the strength of the tendency of the uneducated mind to give an outward material reality to its own inward processes. This confusion of objective with subjective connexion, which shows itself so uniform in principle, though so various in details, in the practices upon images and names, done with a view of acting through them on their originals or their owners, may be applied to explain one branch after another of the arts of the sorcerer and diviner, till it almost seems as though we were coming near the end of his list, and might set down practices not based on this mental process, as exceptions to a general rule. When a lock of hair is cut off as a memorial, the subjective connexion between it and its former owner, is not severed. In the mind of the friend who treasures it up, it recalls thoughts of his presence, it is still something belonging to him. We know, however, that the objective connexion was cut by the scissors, and that what is done to that hair afterwards, is not 1 Davis, vol. ii. p. 215. 2 Lane, Mod. Eg., vol. i. p. 347-8. Petherick, Egypt, etc. j Edinburgh, 1861, p. 221. 128 IMAGES AND NAMES. felt by the head on which it grew. But this is exactly what the savage has not come to know. He feels that the subjective bond is unbroken in his own mind, and he believes that the objective bond, which his mind never gets clearly separate from it, is unbroken too. Therefore, in the remotest parts of the world, the sorcerer gets clippings of the hair of his enemy, parings of his nails, leavings of his food, and practises upon them, that their former possessor may fall sick and die. This is why South Sea Island chiefs had servants always following them with spittoons, that the spittle might be buried in some secret place, where no sorcerer could find it, and why even brothers and sisters had their food in separate baskets. In the island of Tanna, in the New Hebrides, there was a colony of disease-makers who lived by their art. They collected any nahak or rubbish that had belonged to any one, such as the skin of a banana he had eaten, wrapped it in a leaf like a cigar, and burnt it slowly at one end. As it. burnt, the owner got worse and worse, and if it was burnt to the end, he died. When a man fell ill, he knew that some sorcerer was burning his rubbish, and shell-trumpets, which could be heard for miles, were blown to signal to the sorcerers to stop, and wait for the presents which would be sent next morning. Night after night, Mr. Turner used to hear the melancholy too-tooing of the shells, entreating the wizards to stop plaguing their victims. And when a disease-maker fell sick himself, he believed that some one was burning his rubbish, and had his shells too blown for mercy. 1 It is not needful to give another description after this, the process is so perfectly the same in principle wherever it is found, all over Polynesia, 2 in Africa, 3 in India, 4 in North and South America, 5 in Australia. 6 It is alive to this day in Italy, where a man does not like to trust a lock of his hair in the hands of any one, lest he should be bewitched or enamoured against his will. 7 1 Turner, * Polynesia,' pp. 18, 89, 424. 2 Polack, ' Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders ;' London, 1840, vol. i. p. 282. Ellis, vol. ii. p. 228. Williams, « Fiji,' vol. i. p. 249. Purchas, vol. ii. p. 1652, etc. 3 Casalis, p. 276. 4 Roberts, Or. Illustr. p. 470. 5 Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 168. Fitz Roy, in Tr. Eth. Soc. j London, 1861, p. 5. 6 Stanbridge, id., p. 229. 7 Story, c Roba di Roma ;' London, 1863, vol. ii. p. 342. IMAGES AND NAMES. 129 One of the best accounts we have of the art of procuring death by sorcery, is given in Sir James Emerson Tennent's great work on Ceylon. It is not that there is much that is peculiar in the processes it describes, but just the contrary ; its importance lies in its presenting, among a somewhat isolated race, a system of sorcery, which is quite a little museum of the arts practised among the most dissimilar tribes in the remotest regions of the world. The account is as follows : — " The vidahu stated to the magistrate that a general belief existed among the Tamils [of Ceylon] in the fatal effects of a ceremony, per- formed with the skull of a child, with the design of producing the death of an individual against whom the incantation is directed. The skull of a male child, and particularly of a first- born, is preferred, and the effects are regarded as more certain if it be killed expressly for the occasion ; but for ordinary pur- poses, the head of one who had died a natural death is pre- sumed to be sufficient. The form of the ceremony is to draw certain figures and cabalistic signs upon the skull, after it has been scraped and denuded of the flesh j adding the name of the individual upon whom the charm is to take effect. A paste is then prepared, composed of sand from the footprints of the intended victim, and a portion of his hair moistened with his saliva, and this, being spread upon a leaden plate, is taken, together with the skull, to the graveyard of the village, where for forty nights the evil spirits are invoked to destroy the per- son so denounced. The universal belief of the natives is, that as the ceremony proceeds, and the paste dries up on the leaden plate, the sufferer will waste away and decline, and that death, as an inevitable consequence, must follow." 1 Here we have at once the name, the earth-cutting, the hair and saliva, the cursing, and the drying up. The use of the skull lies in its association with death, and we shall presently find it used in the same way in a very different place. Even the spirits of the dead may be acted on through the remains of their bodies. Though the savage commonly holds that after death the soul goes its own way, for the most part independently of the body to which it once belonged, yet in his 1 Tennent, ' Ceylon,' vol. ii. p. 545. K 130 IMAGES AND NAMES. mind the soul and the body of his enemy or his friend are inse- parably associated, and thus he comes to hold, in his inconsis- tent way, that a bond of connexion must after all survive be- tween them. Therefore, the African fastens the jaw of his slain enemy to a tabor or a horn, and his skull to the big drum, that every crash and blast may send a thrill of agony through the ghost of their dead owner. 1 The connexion between a cut lock of hair and its former owner is, in the mind at least, much closer than is necessary for these purposes. As has been seen, the remains of a per- son's food are sufficient to bewitch^ him by. In a witchcraft case in the seventeenth century, the supposed sorceress con- fessed that ' ' there was a glove of the said Lord Henry buried in the ground, and as that glove did rot and waste, so did the liver of the said lord rot and waste." 2 Indeed, any association of ideas in a man's mind, the vaguest similarity of form or po- sition, even a mere coincidence in time, is sufficient to enable the magician to work from association in his own mind, to asso- ciation in the material world. Nor is there any essential dif- ference in the process, whether his art is that of the diviner or of the sorcerer, that is, whether his object is merely to foretell something that will happen to a person, or actually to make that something happen; or if he is only concerned with the searching out of the hidden past, the process remains much the same, the intention only is different. Out of the endless store of examples, I will do no more than take a few typical cases. They hang up charms in the Pacific Islands to keep thieves and trespassers out of plantations ; a few cocoa-nut leaves, plaited into the form of a shark, will cause the thief who disregards it to be eaten by a real one ; two sticks, set one across the other, will send a pain right across his body, and the very sight of these tabus will send thieves and trespassers off in terror. 3 In Kamchatka, when something had been stolen, and the thief could not be discovered, they would throw nerves or sinews into the fire, that as they shrank and wriggled with the heat, the like might happen to the body 1 Komer, ' Guinea ;' p. 112. Klemm, C. Gr., toI. iii. p. 352. 2 Brand, vol. Hi. p. 29. 3 Turner, p. 294. IMAGES AND NAMES. 131 of the thief. 1 In New Zealand, when a male child had been baptized in the native manner, and had received its name, they thrust small pebbles, the size of a large pin's head, down its throat, to make its heart callous, hard, and incapable of pity. 2 The Eed Indian hunter wears ornaments of the claws of the grizzly bear, that he may be endowed with its courage and fero- city, 3 a simpler charm than that whereby the magicians made men invincible in Pliny's time, in which the head and tail of a dragon, marrow of a lion and hair from his forehead, foam of a victorious racehorse, and claws of a dog, were bound together in a piece of deerskin, with alternate sinews of a deer and a gazelle. 4 Many of the food-prejudices of savage races depend on the belief which belongs to this class of superstitions, that the qualities of the eaten pass into the eater. Thus, among the Dayaks, young men sometimes abstain from the flesh of deer, lest it should make them timid, and before a pig-hunt they avoid oil, lest the game should slip through their fingers, 5 and in the same way the flesh of slow-going and cowardly animals is not to be eaten by the warriors of South America ; but they love the meat of tigers, stags, and boars, for courage and speed. 6 An English merchant in Shanghai, at the time of the Taeping attack, met his Chinese servant carrying home a heart, and asked him what he had got there. He said it was the heart of a rebel, and that he was going to take it home and eat it to make him brave. When a Maori war -party is to start, the priests set up sticks in the ground to represent the warriors, and he whose stick is blown down is to fall in the battle. 7 In the Fiji Islands, the diviner will shake a bunch of dry cocoa-nuts to see whether a sick child will die ; if all fall off, it will recover ; if any remain on, it will die. He will spin a cocoa-nut, and decide a question ac- cording to where the eye of the nut looks towards when at rest again, or he will sit on the ground and take omens from his legs ; if the right leg trembles first, it is good ; if the left, it is 1 Kracheninnikow, Descr. du Kamtchatka; Paris, 1768, p. 22. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 297. 2 Yate, p. 83. 3 Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 69. 4 Plin., xxix. 20. 5 St, John, vol. i. p. 176. 6 Dobrizhoffer, vol. i. p. 258. 7 Polack, vol. i. p. 270. k2 132 IMAGES AND NAMES. evil ; or lie will decide by whether a leaf tastes sweet or bitter, or whether he bites it clean through at once, or whether drops of water will run down his arm to the wrist and give a good answer, or fall off by the way and give a bad one. 1 In British Guiana, when young children are betrothed, trees are planted by the respective parties in witness of the contract, and if either tree should happen to wither, the child it belongs to is sure to die. 2 A slightly different idea appears north of the Isthmus, in the Central American tale, where the two brothers, starting on their dangerous journey to the land of Xibalba, where their father had perished, plant each a cane in the middle of their grandmother's house, that she may know by its nourishing or withering whether they are alive or dead. 3 And again, to take stories from the Old World, when Devasmita would not let Guhasena leave her to go with his merchandise to the land of Cathay, Siva appeared to them in a dream, and gave to each a red lotus that would fade if the other were unfaithful ; 4 and so, in the German tale, when the two daughters of Queen Wilo- witte were turned into flowers, the two princes who were their lovers had each a sprig of his mistress's flower, that was to stay fresh while their love was true. 5 On this principle of association, it is easy to understand how, in the Old World, the names of the heavenly bodies, and their position at the time of a man's birth, should have to do with his character and fate ; while, in the astrology of the Aztecs, the astronomical signs have a similar connexion with the parts of the human body, so that the sign of the Skull has to do with the head, and the sign of the Flint with the teeth. 6 Why fish may be caught in most plenty when the Sun is in the sign of Pisces, is as clear as the reason why trees are to be felled, or vegetables gathered, or manure used, while the moon is on the wane, for these things have to fall, or be consumed, or rot; 1 Williams, ■ Fiji,' p. 228. 2 Rev. J. H. Bernau, ' Missionary Labours in British Guiana ;' London, 1847, p. 59. 3 Brasseur, ' Popol Yuh ;' Paris, 1861, p. 141. 4 Somadeva Bhatta, vol. i. p. 139. 5 J. and W. Grimm, ' Kinder- und Hausmarchen ; ' Gottingen, 1857-6, vol. iii. p. 328. 6 Kingsborough, Vatican MS., vol. ii. pi. 75 ; vols. v. and vi. Expl. IMAGES AND NAMES. ] 33 while, on the other hand, grafts are to be set while the moon is waxing/ and it is only lucky to begin an undertaking when the moon is on the increase, as has been held even in modern times. It is as clear why the Qhinese doctor should administer the heads, middles, and roots of plants, as medicine for the heads, bodies, and legs of his patients respectively, and why passages in books looked at while some thought is in the reader's mind, should be taken as omens, from Western Europe to Eastern Asia, in old times and new. When it is borne in mind that the Tahitians ascribe their internal pains to demons who are inside them, tying their intestines in knots, it becomes easy to understand why the Laplanders, under certain circumstances, object to knots being tied in clothes, and so on from one phase to another of witchcraft and superstition. It would be quite intelligible on this principle, that the sor- cerer should think it possible to impress his own mind upon the outer world, even without any external link of communication. The mere presence of the thought in his mind might be enough to cause, as it were by reflection, a corresponding reality. He is usually found, however, working his will by some mate- rial means, or at least by an utterance of it into the world. This seems to be the case with the rainmaker, or weather- changer, wherever he is met with, that is to say, among most races of man below the highest culture. Sometimes he works by clear association of ideas, as the Samoan rainmakers with their sacred stone, which they wet when they want rain, and put to the fire to dry when they want to dry the weather, 2 or the Lapland wizards, with the winds they used to sell to our sea-captains in a knotted cord, to be let out by untying it knot by knot. In the notable practice of killing an enemy by pro- phesying that he will die, or by uttering a wish that he may, the outward act of speech comes between the thought and the reality, but perhaps a mere unspoken wish may be held suf- ficient. This kind of bewitching is found over almost as wide a range as the practices of the rainmaker, and extends like them into the upper regions of our race. 1 Plin., ix. 35 j xviii. 75 j xvii. 24. 2 Turner, p. 347, and see p. 428. 134 IMAGES AND NAMES. " There dwalt a weaver in Moffat toun, That said the minister wad dee sune ; The minister dee'd ; and the fouk o' the toun, They brant the weaver wi' the wudd o' his lume, And ca'd it weel-wared on the warlock loon." l As has been so often said, these two arts are encouraged by the unfailing test of success, if they have but time enough, and the latter justifies itself by killing the patient through, his own imagination. When he hears that he has been c ' wished," he goes home and takes to his bed at once. It is impossible to realize the state of mind into which, the continual terror of witchcraft brings the savage. It is held by many tribes to be the necessary cause of death. Over great part of Africa, in South America and Polynesia, when a man dies, the question is at once, " who killed him?" and the soothsayer is resorted to to find the murderer, that the dead man may be avenged. The Abipones held that there was no such thing as natural death, and that if it were not for the magicians and the Spa- niards, no man would die unless he were killed. The notion that, after all, a man might perhaps die of himself, comes out curiously in the address of an old Australian to the corpse at a funeral, "If thou comest to the other black-fellows and they ask thee who killed thee, answer, ' No one, but I died/ " 3 There are of course branches of the savage wizard's art that are not connected with the mental process to which so many of his practices may be referred. He is often a doctor with some skill in surgery and medicine, and an expert juggler ; and often, though knavery is not the basis of his profession, a cun- ning knave. One of the most notable superstitions of the human race, high and low, is the belief in the Evil Eye. Knowing, as we all do, the strange power which one mind has of working upon another through the eye, a power which is not the less certain for being wholly unexplained, it seems not un- reasonable to suppose that the belief in the mysterious influ- ences of the Evil Eye flows from the knowledge of what the eye can do as an instrument of the will, while experience has 1 K. Chambers, * Popular Khymes of Scotland ;' Edinburgh, 1826, p. 23. 2 Lang, ■ Queensland j ? London, 1861, p. 360. IMAGES AND NAMES. 135 not yet set such limits as we recognize to the range of its ac- tion. The horror which savages so often have of being looked full in the face, is quite consistent with this feeling. You may- look at him or his, but you must not stare, and above all, you must not look him full in the face, that is to say, you must not do just what the stronger mind does when it uses the eye as an instrument to force its will upon the weaker. It is clear that the superstitions which have been cursorily described in this chapter, are no mere casual extravagances of the human mind. The way in which the magic arts have taken to themselves the verb to " do," as claiming to be " doing " par excellence, sometimes gives us an opportunity of testing their importance in the popular mind. As in Madagascar the sorcerers and diviners of Matitanana go by the name of mpiasa, that is " workers," 1 so words in the languages of our Aryan race show a like transition. In Sanskrit, magic has possessed itself of a whole family of words derived from Icr, to " do," Jcrtya, sorcery, krtvan, enchanting, (literally, working), kdr- mana, enchantment (from harman, a deed, work), and so on, while Latin facere has produced in the Romance languages, Italian fattura, enchantment, old French faiture, Portuguese feitigo (whence fetish) , and a dozen more, and Grimm holds that the most probable derivation of zauber, Old High German zoupar, is from zouwan, Gothic taujan, to do, 2 and other like etymologies are to be found. The belief and practices to which such words refer form a compact and organic whole, mostly developed from a state of mind in which subjective and objective connexions are not yet clearly separated. What then does this mass of evidence show from the ethnologist's point of view ; what is the position of sorcery in the history of man- kind? When Dr. Martius, the Bavarian traveller, was lying one night in his hammock in an Indian hut in South America, and all the inhabitants seemed to be asleep, each family in its own place, his reflexions were interrupted by a strange sight. "In a 1 Ellis, ' Madagascar ; ' vol. i. p. 73. 2 Pictet, ' Origines ;' part ii. p. 641. Diez, Worterb. s. v. " faltizio. ' Grimm, D. M. p. 984, etc. See Diefenbach, Vergl. Worterb. i. 12 ; ii. 659. 136 IMAGES AND NAMES. dark corner there arose an old woman, naked, covered with dnst and ashes, a miserable picture of hunger and wretchedness ; it was the slave of my hosts, a captive taken from another tribe. She crept cautiously to the hearth and blew up the fire, brought out some herbs and bits of human hair, murmured some- thing in an earnest tone, and grinned and gesticulated strangely towards the children of her masters. She scratched a skull, threw herbs and hair rolled into balls into the fire, and so on. For a long while I could not conceive what all this meant, till at last springing from my hammock and coming close to her, I saw by her terror and the imploring gesture she made to me not to betray her, that she was practising magic arts to destroy the children of her enemies and oppressors." "This," he continues, "was not the first example of sorcery I had met with among the Indians. When I considered what delusions and darkness must have been working in the human mind before man could come to fear and invoke dark unknown powers for another's hurt, — when I considered that so complex a super- stition was but the remnant of an originally -pure worship of nature, and what a chain of complications must have preceded such a degradation," etc. etc. 1 I cannot but think that Dr. Martius's deduction is the abso- lute reverse of the truth. Looking at the practices of sorcery among the lower races as a whole, they have not the appear- ance of mutilated and misunderstood fragments of a higher system of belief and knowledge. Among savage tribes we find families of customs and superstitions in great part trace- able to the same principle, the confusion of imagination and reality, of subjective and objective, of the mind and the outer world. Among the higher races we find indeed many of the same customs, but they are scattered, practised by the vulgar with little notion of their meaning, looked down upon with contempt by the more instructed, or explained as mystic sym- bolisms, and at last dropped off one by one as the world grows wiser. There is a curious handful of plain savage superstitions among the rules to which the Roman Flamen Dialis had to 1 Dr. v. Marti us, ' Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Amerikanischen Mensch- heit;' 1839. IMAGES AND NAMES. 137 conform. He was not only prohibited from touching a dog, a she-goat, raw meat, beans, and ivy, but he might not even name them, he might not have a knot tied in his clothes, and the parings of his nails and the clippings of his hair were col- lected and buried under a lucky tree. 1 So little difference does the mere course of time make in such things as these, that a modern missionary to a savage tribe may learn to understand them better than the Romans who practised them two thousand years ago. It is quite true that there are anomalies among the supersti- tious practices of the lower races, proceedings of which the meaning is not clear, signs of the breaking-down or stiffening into formalism of beliefs carried down by tradition to a distance from their source ; and besides, the rites of an old religion, car- ried down through a new one, may mix with such practices as have been described here, while the adherents of one religion are apt to ascribe to magic the beliefs and wonders of another, as the Christians held Odin, and the Romans Moses, to have been mighty enchanters of ancient times. But when we see the whole system of sorcery and divination comparatively com- pact and intelligible among savage tribes, less compact and less intelligible among the lower civilized races, and still less among ourselves, there seems reason to think that such imper- fection and inconsistency as are to be found among this class of superstitions in the lower levels of our race, are signs of a degeneration (so to speak) from a system of error that was more perfect and harmonious in a yet lower condition of mankind, when man had a less clear view of the difference between what was in him and what was out of him, than the lowest savages we have ever studied, — when his life was more like a long dream than even the life that the Puris are leading at this day, deep in the forests of South America. There is a remarkable peculiarity by which the sorcery of the savage seems to repudiate the notion of its having come down from something higher, and to date itself from the child- hood of the human race. There is one musical instrument (if the name may be allowed to it) which we give over to young 1 Aulus Gellius, 'JNootes Atticae,' x. 15. Plut., Q. E., cix. etc. 138 IMAGES AND NAMES. children, who indeed thoroughly appreciate and enjoy it, — the rattle. " Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law, Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw." When the dignity of manhood is to be conferred on a Sia- mese prince by cutting his hair and giving him a new dress, they shake a rattle before him as he goes, to show that till the ceremony is performed, he is still a child. As if to keep us continually in mind of his place in history, the savage magician clings with wonderful pertinacity to the same instrument. It is a bunch of hoofs tied together, a blown bladder with peas in it, or, more often than anything else, a calabash with stones or shells or bones inside. It is his great instrument in curing the sick, the accompaniment of his medicine- songs, and the symbol of his profession, among the Red Indians, among the South American tribes, and in Africa. For the magician's work, it holds its own against far higher instruments, the whistles and pipes of the American, and even the comparatively high-class flutes, harmonicons, and stringed instruments of the negro. 1 Next above the rattle in the scale of musical instruments is the drum, and it too has been to a great extent adopted by the sorcerer, and, often painted with magic figures, it is an impor- tant implement to him in Lapland, in Siberia, among some North American and some South American tribes. 2 The clinging together of savage sorcery with these childish instru- ments, is in full consistency with the theory that both belong to the infancy of mankind. With less truth to nature and his- tory, the modern spirit-rapper, though his bringing up the spirits of the dead by doing hocus-pocus under a table or in a dark room is so like the proceedings of the African mganga or the Red Indian medicine-man, has cast off the proper ac- companiments of his trade, and juggles with fiddles and ac- cordions. 1 Catlin, vol. i. p. 39, 109. Schoolcraft, part i. p. 310 ; part ii. p. 179. Char- levoix, vol. vi. p. 187. Burton, ' Central Africa,' vol. i. p. 44 ; vol. ii. p. 295. Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1339, 1520, etc. etc. Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 72. Klemm, C.Gr., vol. ii. p. 169, 171-2. See Strabo, xv. 1, 22. 2 Eegnard, ' Lapland,' in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 168, 180. Eavenstein, p. 93. Molina, Hist, of Chile, E. Tr. ; London, 1809, vol. ii. p. 106, etc. etc. IMAGES AND NAMES. 139 The question whether there is any historical connexion among the superstitious practices of the lower races, is distinct from that of their development from the human mind. On the whole, the similarity that runs through the sorcerer's art in the most remote countries, not only in principle, but so often in details, as for instance in the wide prevalence of the practice of bewitching by locks of hair and rubbish which once be- longed to the victim, often favours the view that these coinci- dences are not independent growths from the same principle, but practices which have spread from one geographical source. I have put together in another place some accounts of one of the most widely spread phenomena of sorcery, the pretended extraction of bits of wood, stone, hair, and such things, from the bodies of the sick, which is based upon the belief that disease is caused by such objects having been conjured into them. The value of this belief to the ethnologist depends much on its being difficult to explain it, and therefore also difficult to look upon it as having often arisen independently in the human mind. But from the intelligible, and to a particular state of mind one might almost say reasonable, beliefs and practices which have been described in the present chapter, it seems hardly prudent to draw inferences as to the descent and communication of the races among whom they are found, at least while the ethnological argument from beliefs and customs is still in its infancy. To turn now to a different subject, the same state of mind which has had so large a share in the development of sorcery, has also manifested itself in a very remarkable series of obser- vances regarding spoken words, prohibiting the mention of the names of people, or even sometimes of animals and things. A man will not utter his own name ; husband and wife will not utter one another's names ; the son or daughter-in-law will not mention the name of the father or mother-in-law, and vice versa; the names of chiefs may not be uttered, nor the names of cer- tain other persons, nor of superhuman beings, nor of animals and things to which supernatural powers are ascribed. These various prohibitions are not found all together, but one tribe may hold to several of them. A few details will suffice to give an idea of the extent and variety of this series of superstitions. 140 IMAGES AND NAMES. The intense aversion which savages have from uttering their own names, has often been noticed by travellers. Thus Captain Mayne says of the Indians of British Columbia, that (i one of their strangest prejudices, which appears to pervade all tribes alike, is a dislike to telling their names — thus you never get a man's right name from himself; but they will tell each other's names without hesitation." 1 So Dobrizhoffer says that the Abipones of South America think it a sin to utter their own names, and when a man was asked his name, he would nudge his neighbour to answer for him, 2 and in like manner, the Fijians and the Sumatrans are described as looking to a friend to help them out of the difficulty, when this indiscreet question is put to them. 3 Nor does the dislike to mentioning ordinary personal names always stop at this limit. Among the Algonquin tribes, children are generally named by the old woman of the family, usually with reference to some dream, but this real name is kept mysteriously secret, and what usually passes for the name is a mere nickname, such as " Little Fox," or " Red-Head." The real name is hardly ever revealed even by the grave-post, but the totem or symbol of the clan is held sufficient. The true name of La Belle Sauvage was not Pocahontas, " her true name was Matokes, which they concealed from the English, in a superstitious fear of hurt by the English, if her name was known." 4 "It is next to impossible to induce an Indian to utter personal names ; the utmost he will do, if a person im- plicated is present, is to move his lips, without speaking, in the direction of the person." Schoolcraft saw an Indian in a court of justice, pressed to identify a man who was there, but all they could get him to do was to push his lips towards him. 5 So Mr. Backhouse describes how a native woman of Van Die- men's Land threw sticks at a friendly Englishman, who in his ignorance of native manners, mentioned her son, who was at school at Newtown. 6 1 Mayne, * British Columbia,' etc. ; London, 1862, p. 278. 2 Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 444. 3 Seemann, ■ Viti ; ' London, 1862, p. 190. Marsden, Hist, of Sumatra ; London, 1811, p. 286. * Schoolcraft, part ii. p. 65. 5 Id. p. 433. See also Burton, ' City of the Saints/ p. 141. 6 Backhouse, 'Australia,' p. 93>. IMAGES AND NAMES. 141 In various parts of the world, a variety of remarkable customs are observed between men and women, and their fathers- and mothers-in-law. These will be noticed elsewhere, but it is necessary to mention here, that among the Dayaks of Borneo, a man must not pronounce the name of his father-in-law ; l among the Omahas of North America, the father- and mother- in-law do not speak to their son-in-law, or mention his name, 3 nor do they call him or he them by name among the Dacotahs. 3 Again, the wife is in some places prohibited from mentioning her husband's name. "A Hindoo wife is never, under any circumstances, to mention the name of her husband. ( He/ ' The Master/ ' Swamy/.etc, are titles she uses when speaking of, or to her lord. In no way can one of the sex annoy another more intensely and bitterly, than by charging her with having mentioned her husband's name. It is a crime not easily for- given/' 4 In East Africa, among the Barea, the wife never utters the name of her husband, or eats in his presence, and even among the Beni Amer, where the women have extensive privileges and great social power, the wife is still not allowed to eat in the husband's presence, and only mentions his name before strangers. 5 The Kafir custom prohibits wives from speaking the names of relatives of their husbands and fathers- in-law, In Australia, among the names which in some tribes must not be spoken, are those of a father- or mother-in-law, of a son-in-law, and of persons in some kind of connexion by marriage. Another of the Australian prohibitions is not only very curious, but is curious as having apparently no analogue elsewhere. Among certain tribes in the Murray River district, the youths undergo, instead of circumcision, an operation called wharepin, and afterwards, the natives who have officiated, and those who have been operated upon, though they may meet and talk, must never mention one another's names, nor must the name of one even be spoken by a third person in the pre- sence of the other. 6 1 St. John, vol. i. p. 51. 2 Long's Exp., vol. i. p. 253. 3 Schoolcraft, part ii. p. 1S6. 4 F. de W. Ward, « India and the Hindoos ; ' London, 1853, p. 189. 6 Munzinger, ' Ostafrikanische Studien ; ' Schaffhausen, 1864, pp. 325, 526. 6 Eyre, vol. ii. pp. 336-9. The wharepin is a ceremonial depilation. 142 IMAGES AND NAMES. It is especially in Eastern Asia and Polynesia, that we find the names of kings and chiefs held as sacred, and not to be lightly spoken. In Siarn, the king mnst be spoken of by some epithet ; l in India and Burmah, the royal name is avoided as something sacred and mysterious ; and in Polynesia, the pro- hibition to mention chiefs' names has even impressed itself deeply in the language of the islands where it prevails. 2 But it is among the most distant and various races that we find one class of names avoided with mysterious horror, the names of the dead. In North America, the dead are to be alluded to, not mentioned by name, especially in the presence of a relative. 3 In South America, he must be mentioned among the Abipones as " the man who does not now exist," or some such periphrasis ; * and the Fuegians have a horror of any kind of allusion to their dead friends, and when a child asks for its dead father or mother, they will say, " Silence ! don't speak bad words." 5 The Samoied only speaks of the dead by allusion, for it would disquiet them to utter their names. 6 The Austra- lians, like the North Americans, will set up the pictured crest or symbol of the dead man's clan, but his name is not to be spoken. Dr. Lang tried to get from an Australian the name of a native who had been killed. " He told me who the lad's father was, who was his brother, what he was like, how he walked when he was alive, how he held the tomahawk in his left hand instead of his right (for he had been left-hauded), and with whom he usually associated ; but the dreaded name never escaped his lips ; and I believe no promises or threats could have induced him to utter it." 7 The Papuans of the Eastern Archipelago avoid speaking the names of the dead, and in Africa, a like prejudice is found among the Masai. 8 In the Old World, Pliny says of the Roman custom, " Why, when we mention the dead, do we declare that we do not vex their memory ? " 9 and indeed, the superstition is still to be found in % 1 Bowring, p. 38. 2 Polack, vol. i. p. 38. 3 Simpson, Journey, vol. i. p. 130. Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 234. 4 Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 273. 5 Despard, ' Fireland,' ('Sunday at Home,' Oct. 31, 1863). 6 Klemm, C. G-., vol. ii. p. 226. 7 Lang, « Queensland,' pp. 367, 387. Eyre, 1. c. 8 Bastian, vol. ii. p. 276, etc. 9 Plin., xxviii. 5. IMAGES AND NAMES. 143 modern Europe, and better marked than in ancient Eome; perhaps nowhere more notably than in Shetland, where it is all but impossible to get a widow, at any distance of time, to mention the name of her dead husband, though she will talk about him by the hour. No dead person must be mentioned, for his ghost will come to him who speaks his name. 1 To conclude the list, the dislike to mentioning the names of spiritual or superhuman beings, and everything to which super- natural powers are ascribed, is, as every one knows, very gene- ral. The Dayak will not speak of the small-pox by name, but will call it " the chief" or "jungle leaves," or say " Has he left you ? " 2 The euphemism of calling the Furies the Eumenides, or ' gracious ones/ is the stock illustration of this feeling, and the euphemisms for fairies and for the devil are too familiar to quote. The Yezidis, who worship Satan, have a horror of his name being mentioned. The Laplanders will call the bear " the old man with the fur coat," but they do not like to men- tion his name. In Asia, the same dislike to speak of the tiger is found in Siberia, among the Tunguz ; 3 and in Annam, where he is called "Grandfather" or "Lord," 4 while in Su- matra, they are spoken of as the " wild animals " or u ances- tors." 5 The name of Brahma is a sacred thing in India, as that of Jehovah is to the Jews, not to be uttered but on solemn occasions. The Moslem, it is true, has the name of Allah for ever on his lips, but this, as has been mentioned, is only an epithet, not the " great name." Among this series of prohibitions, several cases seem, like the burning in effigy among the practices with images, to fall into mere association of ideas, devoid of any superstitious thought. The names of husbands, of chiefs, of supernatural beings, or of the dead, may be avoided from an objection to liberties being taken with the property of a superior, from a dislike to as- sociate names of what is sacred with common life, or to revive hateful thoughts of death and sorrow. But in other instances, 1 Mrs. Edmondston, ■ Shetland Islands ; ' Edin., 1856, p. 20. 2 St. John, vol. i. p. 62. 3 Kavenstein, p. 382. 4 Mouhot, ' Travels in Indo- China,' etc. ; London, 1864, vol. i. p. 263. 6 Marsden, p. 292. 144 IMAGES AND NAMES. the notion comes out with great clearness,, that the mere speak- ing of a name acts upon its owner, whether that owner be man, beast, or spirit, whether near or far off. Sometimes it may be explained by considering supernatural creatures as having the power of hearing their names wherever they are uttered, and as sometimes coming to trouble the living when they are thus dis- turbed. Where this is an accepted belief, such sayings as " Talk of the Devil and you see his horns," " Parlez du Loup," etc., have a far more serious meaning than they bear to us now. Thus an aged Indian of Lake Michigan explained why the native wonder-tales must only be told in the winter, for then the deep snow lies on the ground, and the thick ice covers up the waters, and so the spirits that dwell there cannot hear the laughter of the crowd listening to their stories round the fire in the winter lodge. But in spring the spirit-world is all alive, and the hunter never alludes to the spirits but in a sedate, reverent way, careful lest the slightest word should give of- fence. 1 In other cases, however, the effect of the utterance of the name on the name's owner would seem to be different from this. The explanation does not hold in the case of a man re- fusing to speak his own name, nor would he be likely to think that his mother-in-law could hear whenever he mentioned hers. Some of these prohibitions of names have caused a very curious phenomenon in language. When the prohibited name is a word in use, and often when it is only something like such a word, that word has to be dropped and a new one found to take its place. Several languages are known to have been specially affected by this proceeding, and it is to be remarked that in them the causes of prohibition have been different. In the South Sea Islands, words have been tabued, from connexion with the names of chiefs ; in Australia, Van Diemen's Land, and among the Abipones of South America, from connexion with the names of the dead ; while in South Africa, the avoid- ance of the names of certain relatives by marriage has led to a result in some degree similar. Captain Cook noticed in Tahiti that when a chief came to the royal dignity, any words resembling his name were changed. 1 Schoolcraft, part iii. pp. 314, 492. IMAGES AND NAMES. 145 Even to call a horse or a dog " Prince V or " Princess " was dis- gusting to the native mind. 1 Polack says that from a New Zealand chief being called " War," which means ' ' water," a new name had to be given to water. A chief was called " Ma- ripi," or ' ' knife ; " and knives were called, in consequence, by another name, "nekra." 2 Hale, the philologist to the U. S. Exploring Expedition, gives an account of the similar Tahitian practice known as te pi, by virtue of which, for instance, the syllable tu was changed even in indifferent words, because' there was a king whose name was Tu. Thus fetu (star) was changed to fetia, tui (to strike) became tiai, and so on. 3 Mentioning the Australian prohibition of uttering the names of the dead, Mr. Eyre says : — " In cases where the name of a native has been that of some bird or animal of almost daily re- currence, a new name is given to the object, and adopted in the language of the tribe. Thus at Moorunde, a favourite son of the native Tenberry was called Torpool, or the Teal; upon the child's death the appellation of tilquaitch was given to the teal, and that of torpool altogether dropped among the Moo- runde tribe." 4 The change of language in Tasmania, which has resulted from dropping the names of the dead, is thus de- scribed by Mr. Milligan :— " The elision and absolute rejection and disuse of words from time to time has been noticed as a source of change in the Aboriginal dialects. It happened thus : — The names of men and women were taken from na- tural objects and occurrences around, as, for instance, a kan- garoo, a gum-tree, snow, hail, thunder, the wind, the sea, the Waratah — or Blandifordia or Boronia when in blossom, etc., but it was a settled custom in every tribe, upon the death of any individual, most scrupulously to abstain ever after from men- tioning the name of the deceased, — a rule, the infraction of which would, they considered, be followed by some dire calami- ties : they therefore used great circumlocution in referring to a dead person, so as to avoid pronunciation of the name, — if, for 1 Cook, Third Yoyage, vol. ii. p. 170. 2 Polack, vol. i. p. 38 j vol. ii. p. 126. - 3 Hale, in U.S. Exp., vol. vi. p. 288. Max Muller, 'Lectures,' 2nd series j London, 1864, pp. 34-41. 4 Eyre, vol. ii. p. 354. L 146 IMAGES AND NAMES. instance, William and Mary, man and wife, were both deceased, and Lucy, the deceased sister of William, had been married to Isaac, also dead, whose son Jemmy still survived, and they wished to speak of Mary, they would say f the wife of the brother of Jemmy's father's wife/ and so on. Such a practice must, it is clear, have contributed materially to reduce the number of their substantive appellations, and to create a neces- sity for new phonetic symbols to represent old ideas, which new vocables would in all probability differ on each occasion, and in every separate tribe ; the only chance of fusion of words be- tween tribes arising out of the capture of females for wives from hostile and alien people, — a custom generally prevalent, and doubtless as beneficial to the race in its effects as it was savage in its mode of execution." 1 Martin Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, gives the follow- ing account of the way in which this change was going on in the language of the Abipones in his time. " The Abiponian language is involved in new difficulties by a ridiculous custom which the savages have of continually abolishing words common to the whole nation, and substituting new ones in their stead. Funeral rites are the origin of this custom. The Abipones do not like that anything should remain to remind them of the dead. Hence appellative words bearing any affinity with the names of the deceased are presently abolished. During the first years that I spent amongst the Abipones, it was usual to say Hegmalkam kahamdtek ?, ' When will there be a slaugh- tering of oxen ? ' On account of the death of some Abipone, the word hahamdtek was interdicted, and, in its stead, they were all commanded, by the voice of a crier, to say, Hegmal- kam negerkata ? The word nihirenak, a tiger, was exchanged for arpanigehak ; peue, a crocodile, for kaejprliak, and kadma, Spaniards, for Rikil, because these words bore some resem- blance to the names of Abipones lately deceased. Hence it is that our vocabularies are so full of blots, occasioned by our having such frequent occasion to obliterate interdicted words, and insert new ones." 2 1 Milligan, in Papers, etc., of Key. Soc. of Tasmania, yoL iii. part ii. 1859, p. 281. 2 Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 203. IMAGES AND NAMES. 147 In South Africa, it appears that some Kafir tribes drop from their language words resembling the names of their former chiefs. Thus the Ama-Mbalu do not call the sun by its ordi- nary Zulu name i-langa, but their first chief's name having been Ulanga, they use the word i-sota instead. It is also among the Kafirs that the peculiar custom of uku-hlonipa is found, which is remarked upon by Professor Max Miiller in his second course of lectures. 1 The following account of it is from another source, the Rev. J. L. Dohne, who thus speaks of it under the verb hlonijpa, which means to be bashful, to keep at a distance through timidity, to shun approach, to avoid mentioning one's name, to be respectful. "This word de- scribes a custom, between the nearest relations, and is exclu- sively applied to the female sex, who, when married, are not allowed to call the names of the relatives of their husbands nor of their fathers-in-law. They must keep at a distance from the latter. Hence they have the habit of inventing new names for the members of the family, which is always resorted to when those names happen to be either derived from, or are equivalent to some other word of the common language, as, for instance, if the father or brother-in-law is called Umehlo, which is derived from amehlo, eyes, the isifazi [female sex] will no longer use amehlo but substitute amakangelo (look- ings), etc., and hence, the izwi lezifazi, i.e. : women-word or language has originated." 2 Other instances of change of language by interdicting words are to be found. The Yezidis, who worship the devil, not only refuse to speak the name of Sheitan, but they have dropped the word sliat, " river/' as too much like it, and use the word nahr instead. Nor will they utter the word keitan, " thread" or "fringe," and even naal> "horse-shoe,''' and naal-band, " farrier," are forbidden words, because they approach to laan, 11 curse," and maloun, " accursed." 3 It is curious to observe that a " disease of language" belonging to the same family has shown itself in English-speaking countries and in modern 1 Max Miiller, /. c. 2 Dohne, ' Zulu-Kafir Dictionary ;' Cape Town, 1857, s.v. hlonipa. 3 Layard, 'Nineveh;' London, 1819, vol. i. p. 297. L 2 148 IMAGES AND NAMES. times. In America especially, a number of very harmless words have been ' ' tabooed n of late years, not for any offence of their own, but for having a resemblance in sound to words looked upon as indelicate, or even because slang has adopted them to express ideas ignored by a somewhat over-fastidious propriety. We in England are not wholly clear from this of- fence against good taste, but we have been fortunate in seeing it developed into its full ugliness abroad, and may hope that it is checked once for all among ourselves. It may be said in concluding the subject of Images and Names, that the effect of an inability to separate, so clearly as we do, the external object from the mere thought or idea of it in the mind, shows itself very fully and clearly in the superstitious beliefs and practices of the untaught man, but its results are by no means confined to such matters. It is not too much to say that nothing short of a history of Philosophy and Religion would be required to follow them out. The accumulated ex- perience of so many ages has indeed brought to us far clearer views in these matters than the savage has, though after all we soon come to the point where our knowledge stops, and the opinions which ordinary educated men hold, or at least act upon, as to the relation between ideas and things, may come in time to be superseded by others taken from a higher level. But between our clearness of separation of what is in the mind from what is out of it, and the mental confusion of the lowest savages of our own day, there is a vast interval. More- over, as has just been said, the appearance even in the system of savage superstition, of things which seem to have outlived the recollection of their original meaning, may perhaps lead us back to a still earlier condition of the human mind. Especially we may see, in the superstitions connected with language, the vast difference between what a name is to the savage and what it is to us, to whom ' ' words are the counters of wise men and the money of fools." Lower down in the history of culture, the word and the idea are found sticking together with a tenacity very different from their weak adhesion in our minds, and there is to be seen a tendency to grasp at the word as though it were the object it stands for, and to hold that to be able to IMAGES AND NAMES. 149 speak of a thing gives a sort of possession of it, in a way that we can scarcely realize. Perhaps this state of mind was hardly ever so clearly brought into view as in a story told by Dr. Lieber. " I was looking lately at a negro who was occupied in feeding young mocking-birds by the hand. ' Would they eat worms V I asked. The negro replied, ' Surely not, they are too young, they would not know what to call them/ >n 1 Lieber, ■ Laura Bridgman j' Smiths. C, 1851, p. 9. 150 CHAPTER VII. GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. Direct record is the mainstay of History,, and where this fails us in remote places and times, it becomes much more difficult to make out where civilization has gone forward, and where it has fallen back. As to progress in the first place ; when any important movement has been made in modern times, there have usually been well-informed contemporary writers, only too glad to come before the public with something to say that the world cared to hear. But in going down to the lower levels of traditional history, this state of things changes. It is not only that real information becomes more and more scarce, but that the same curiosity that we feel about the origin and growth of civilization, unfortunately combined with a dis- position to take any semblance of an answer rather than live in face of mere blank conscious ignorance, has favoured the growth of the crowd of mythic inventors and civilizers, who have their place in the legends of so many distant ages and countries. Their stories often give us names, dates, and places, even the causes which led to change, — just the information wanted, if only it were true. And, indeed, recollections of real men and their inventions may sometimes have come to be included among the tales of these gods, heroes, and sages ; and sometimes a mythic garb may clothe real history, as when Cadmus, Dip, " The East," brings the Phoenician letters to Greece. But, as a rule, not history, but mythology fallen cold GROWTH AND DECLINE OP CULTURE. 151 and dead, or even etymology, allusion, fancy, are their only basis, from Sol, the son of Oceanus, who found out how to mine and melt the brilliant, sun-like gold, and Pyrodes, the " Fiery," who discovered how to get fire from flint, and the merchants who invented the art of glass-making (known in Egypt in such remote antiquity) by making fires on the sandy Phoenician coast, with their kettles set to boil over them on lumps of natron, brought for this likely purpose from their ship, — across the world to Kahukura, who got the fairies' fishing-net from which the New Zealanders learnt the art of netting, and the Chinese pair, Hoei and Y-meu, of whom the one invented the bow, and the other the arrow. As the gods Ceres and Bacchus become the givers of corn and wine to mortals, so across the Atlantic there has grown out of a simple mythic conception of nature, the story of the great enlightener and civilizer of Mexico. When the key which Professor Miiller and Mr. Cox have used with such suc- cess in unlocking the Indo-European mythology is put to the mass of traditions of the Mexican Quetzalcohuatl, collected by the Abbe Brasseur, 1 the real nature of this personage shows out at once. He was the son of Camaxtli, the great Toltec conqueror who reigned over the land of Anahuac. His mother died at his birth, and in his childhood he was cared for by the virgin priestesses who kept up the sacred fire, emblem of the sun. While yet a boy he was bold in war, and followed his father on his marches. But while he was far away, a band of enemies rose against his father, and with them joined the Mixcohuas, the " Cloud- Snakes," and they fell upon the aged king and choked him, and buried his body in the temple of Mixcoate- petl, the "Mountain of the Cloud- Snakes." Time passed on, and Quetzalcohuatl knew not what had happened, but at last the Eagle came to him and told him that his father was slain and had gone down into the tomb. Then Quetzalcohuatl rose and went with his followers to attack the temple of the Cloud- Snakes' Mountain, where the murderers had fortified them- selves, mocking him from their battlements. But he mined in 1 Brasseur, ' Histoire,' vol. i. books ii. and iii. See vol. iii. book xii. chapter iii. 152 GROWTH AND DECLINE OP CULTURE. a way from below, and rushed into the temple among them with his Tigers. Many he slew outright, but the bodies of the guiltiest he hewed and hacked, and throwing red pepper on their wounds, left them to die. After this there comes another story. Quetzalcohuatl ap- peared at Panuco, up a river on the Eastern Coast. He had landed there from his ship, coming no man knew from whence. He was tall, of white complexion, pleasant to look upon, with fair hair and bushy beard, dressed in long flowing robes. Be- ceived everywhere as a messenger from heaven, he travelled inland across the hot countries of the coast to the temperate regions of the interior, and there he became a priest, a law- giver, and a king. The beautiful land of the Toltecs teemed with fruit and flowers, and his reign was their Golden Age. Poverty was unknown, and the people revelled in every joy of riches and well-being. The Toltecs themselves were not like the small dark Aztecs of later times ; they were large of sta- ture and fair almost as Europeans, and (sun-like) they could run unresting all the long day. Quetzalcohuatl brought with him builders, painters, astronomers, and artists in many other crafts. He made roads for travel, and favoured the wayfaring merchants from distant lands. He was the founder of history, the lawgiver, the inventor of the calendar of days and years, the composer of the Tonalamatl, the " Sun-Book," where the Tonalpouhqui, " he who counts by the sun," read the destinies of men in astrological predictions, and he regulated the times of the solemn ceremonies, the festival of the new year and of the fifty-two years' cycle. But after a reign of years of peace and prosperity, trouble came upon him too. His enemies banded themselves against him, and their head was a chief who bore a name of the Sun, Tetzcatlipoca, the " Smoking Mirror," a splendid youth, a kinsman of Quetzalcohuatl, but his bitter enemy. They rose against Quetzalcohuatl, and he departed. The kingdom, he said, was no longer under his charge, he had a mission, elsewhere, for the master of distant lands had sent to seek him, and this master was the Sun. He went to Cholullan, ' ' the place of the fugitive," and founded there another empire, but his enemy followed him with his GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 153 armies, and Quetzalcohuatl said lie must begone to the land of Tlapallan, for Heaven willed that he should visit other coun- tries, to spread there the light of his doctrine ; but when his mission was done, he would return and spend his old age with them. So he departed and went down a river on his ship to the sea, and there he disappeared. The sunlight glows on the snow-covered peak of Orizaba long after the lands below are wrapped in darkness, and there, some said, his body was car- ried, and rose to heaven in the smoke of the funeral pile, and when he vanished, the sun for a time refused to show himself again. How dim the meaning of these tales had grown among the Mexicans, when Montezuma thought he saw in Cortes and the Spanish ships the return of the great ruler and his age of gold. Quetzalcohuatl had come back already many a time, to bring light, and joy, and work, upon the earth, for he was the Sun. We may even find him identified with the Sun by name, and his history is perhaps a more compact and perfect series of solar myths than hangs to the name of any single personage in our own Aryan mythology. His mother, the Dawn or the Night, gives birth to him, and dies. His father Camaxtli is the Sun, and was worshipped with solar rites in Mexico, but he is the old Sun of yesterday. The clouds, personified in the mythic race of the Mixcohuas, or " Cloud- Snakes" (the Nibe- lungs of the western hemisphere), bear down the old Sun and choke him, and bury him in their mountain. But the young Quetzalcohuatl, the Sun of to-day, rushes up into the midst of them from below, and some he slays at the first onset, and some he leaves, rift with red wounds, to die. We have the Sun -boat of Helios, of the Egyptian Ea, of the Polynesian Maui. Quetzalcohuatl, his bright career drawing towards its close, is chased into far lands by his kinsman Tetzcatlipoca, the young Sun of to-morrow. He, too, is well-known as a Sun- god in the Mexican theology. Wonderfully fitting with all this, one incident after another in the life of Quetzalcohuatl falls into its place. The guardians of the sacred fire tend him, his funeral pile is on the top of Orizaba, he is the helper of travellers, the maker of the calendar, the source of astrology, 154 GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. the beginner of history, the bringer of wealth and happiness. He is the patron of the craftsman, whom he lights to his la- bour ; as it is written in an ancient Sanskrit hymn, " He steps forth, the splendour of the sky, the wide-seeing, the far-aim- ing, the shining wanderer j surely, enlivened by the sun, do men go to their tasks and do their work." 1 Even his people the Toltecs catch from him solar qualities. Will it be even possible to grant to this famous race, in whose story the legend of Quetzalcohuatl is the leading incident, anything more than a mythic existence ? The student, then, may well look suspiciously on state- ments professing to be direct history of the early growth of civilization, and may even find it best to err on the safe side and not admit them at all, unless they are shown to be pro- bable by other evidence, or unless the tradition is of such a character that it could hardly have arisen but on a basis of fact. For instance, both these tests seem to be satisfied by the Chinese legend concerning quipus. In the times of Yung- ching-che, it is related, people used little cords marked by dif- ferent knots, which, by their numbers and distances, served them instead of writing. The invention is ascribed to the Emperor Suy-jin, the Prometheus of China. 2 Putting names and dates out of the question, this story embodies the assertion that in old times the Chinese used quipus for records, till they were superseded by the art of writing. Now in the first place, it is not easy to imagine how such a story could come into existence, unless it were founded on fact ; and in the second place, an examination of what is known of this curious art in other countries, shows that just what the Chinese say once happened to them, is known to have happened to other races in various parts of the world. The quipu is a near relation of the rosary and the wampum- string. It consists of a cord with knots tied in it for the pur- pose of recalling or suggesting something to the mind. When a farmer's daughter ties a knot in her handkerchief to re- 1 Miiller, Lectures, 2nd series, p. 497. 2 G-oguet, vol. iii. p. 322. De Mailla, Histoire Gen. de la Chine ; Paris, 1777, vol. i. p. 4. GROWTH AND DECLINE OP CULTURE. 155 member a commission at market by, she makes a rudimentary quipu. Darius made one when lie took a thong and tied sixty knots in it, and gave it to the chiefs of the Ionians, that they might untie a knot each day, till, if the knots were all undone, and he had not returned, they might go back to their own land. 1 Such was the string on which Le Boo tied a knot for each ship he met on his voyage, to keep in mind its name and ' country, and that one on which his father, Abba Thulle, tied first thirty knots, and then six more, to remember that Cap- tain Wilson was to come back in thirty moons, or at least in six beyond. 2 This is so simple a device that it may, for all we know, have been invented again and again, and its appearance in several countries does not prove it to have been transmitted from one country to another. It has been found in Asia, 3 in Africa, 4 in Mexico, among the North American Indians ; 5 but its greatest development was in South America. 6 The word quipu, that is, ' ' knot," belongs to the language of Peru, and quipus served there as the regular means of record and communication for a highly-organized society. Von Tschudi describes them as con- sisting of a thick main cord, with thinner cords tied on to it at certain distances, in which the knots are tied. The length of the quipus varies much, the main trunk being often many ells long, sometimes only a single foot, the branches seldom more than two feet, and usually much less. He has dug up a quipu, he says, towards eight pounds in weight, a portion of which is represented in the woodcut from which the accompanying (Fig. 15) is taken. The cords are often of various colours, each with its own proper meaning; red for soldiers, yellow for gold, white for silver, green for corn, and so on. This knot-writing was especially suited for reckonings and statistical tables; a 1 Herod., iv. 98. See Plifi., x. 34. 2 Keate, ' Pelew Islands ;' London, 1788, pp. 367, 392. 3 Ercnan (E. Tr.) ; London, 1848, vol. i. p. 4J2. 4 Goguet, vol. i. pp. 161, 212. Klemm, C. G., vol. i. p. 3. Bastian, vol. i. p. 412. 5 Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 151. Long's Exp., vol. i. p. 235 (a passage which sug- gests a reason for Lucina being the patroness of child-birth). Talbot, Disc, of Lederer, p. 4. 6 Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. iii. p. 20. 156 GEOWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTUEE. single knot meant ten, a double one a hundred, a triple one a thousand, two singles side by side twenty, two doubles two hundred. The distances of the knots from the main cord were of great importance, as was the sequence of the branches, for the principal objects were placed on the first branches and near the trunk, and so in decreasing order. This art of reckoning, Fig. 15. continues Yon Tschudi, is still in use among the herdsmen of the Puna (the high mountain plateau of Peru), and he had it explained to him by them, so that with a little trouble he could read any of their quipus. On the first branch they usually register the bulls, on the second the cows, these again they divide into milch-cows and those that were dry; the next GROWTH AND DECLINE OP CULTURE. 157 branches contain the calves, according to age and sex, then the sheep in several subdivisions, the number of foxes killed, the quantity of salt used, and, lastly, the particulars of the cattle that have died. On other quipus is set down the pro- duce of the herd in milk, cheese, wool, etc. Each heading is indicated by a special colour or a differently twined knot. It was in the same way that in old times the army registers were kept ; on one cord the slingers were set down, on another the spearmen, on a third those with clubs, etc., with their officers ; and thus also the accounts of battles were drawn up. In each town were special functionaries, whose duty was to tie and interpret the quipus ; they were called Quipucamayocuna, or Knot-officers. Insufficient as this kind of writing was, the official historians had attained, during the flourishing of the kingdom of the Incas, to great facility in its interpretation. Nevertheless, they were seldom able to read a quipu without the aid of an oral commentary ; when one came from a distant province, it was necessary to give notice with it whether it re- ferred to census, tribute, war, and so forth. In order to in- dicate matters belonging to their own immediate district, they made at the beginning of the main cord certain signs only in- telligible to themselves, and they also carefully kept the quipus in their proper departments, so as not, for instance, to mistake a tribute-cord for one relating to the census. By constant practice, they so far perfected the system as to be able to re- gister with their knots the most important events of the king- dom, and to set down the laws and ordinances. In modern times, all the attempts made to read the ancient quipus have been in vain. The difficulty in deciphering them is very great, since every knot indicates an idea, and a number of inter- mediate notions are left out. But the principal impediment is the want of the oral information as to their subject-matter, which was needful even to the most learned decipherers. How- ever, should we even succeed in finding the key to their inter- pretation, the results would be of little value ; for what would come to light would be mostly census-records of towns or pro- vinces, taxation-lists, and accounts of the property of deceased persons. There are still some Indians, in the southern pro- 158 GEOWTH AND DECLINE OP CULTUKE. vinces of Peru, who are perfectly familiar with the contents of certain historical quipus preserved from ancient times ; but they keep their knowledge a profound secret, especially from the white men. 1 Coming nearer to China, quipus are found in the Eastern Archipelago and in Polynesia proper, 2 and they were in use in Hawaii forty years ago, in a form seemingly not inferior to the most elaborate Peruvian examples. " The tax-gatherers, though they can neither read nor write, keep very exact accounts of all the articles, of all kinds, collected from the inhabitants through- out the island. This is done principally by one man, and the register is nothing more than a line of cordage from four to five hundred fathoms in length. Distinct portions of this are allotted to the various districts, which are known from one another by knots, loops, and tufts, of different shapes, sizes, and colours. Each tax-payer in the district has his part in this string, and the number of dollars, hogs, dogs, pieces of sandal- wood, quantity of taro, etc., at which he is rated, is well de- fined by means of marks of the above kinds, most ingeniously diversified." 3 The fate of the quipu has been everywhere to be superseded, more or less entirely, by the art of writing. Even the picture- writing of the ancient Mexicans appears to have been strong enough to supplant it. Whether its use in Mexico is men- tioned by any old chronicler or not, I do not know ; but Bo- turini placed the fact beyond doubt by not only finding some specimens in Tlascala, but also recording their Mexican name, nepolmaltzitzin* a word derived from the verb tlapohua, to - count. When, therefore, the Chinese tell us that they once upon a time used this contrivance, and that the art of writing superseded it, the analogy of what has taken place in other countries makes it extremely probable that the tradition is a true one, and this probability is reinforced by the unlikeliness of such a story having been produced by mere fancy. 1 J. J. v. Tschudi, 'Peru; ' St. Gall, 1846, vol. ii. p. 383. 2 Marsden, p. 192. Keate, loc. cit. KLemm, C. Gh, vol. iv. p. 396. 3 Tyerman and Bennet, Journal ; London, 1831, vol. i. p. 455. 4 Boturini, 'Idea de una nueva Historia,' etc.; Madrid, 1746, p. 85. GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 159 Moreover, the historical value of early tradition does not lie exclusively in the fragments of real history it may preserve. Even the myths which it carries down to later times may be- [/ come important indirect evidence in the hands of the ethnolo- gist. And ancient compositions handed down by memory from generation to generation, especially if a poetic form helps to keep them in their original shape, often give,us, if not a sound record of real events, at least a picture of the state of civiliza- tion in which the compositions themselves had their origin. Perhaps no branch of indirect evidence, bearing on the history of culture, has been so well worked as the memorials of earlier states of society, which have thus been unintentionally pre- served, for instance, in the Homeric poems. Safer examples than the following might be quoted ; but as so much has been said of the history of the art of writing, the place may serve to cite what seems to be a memorial of a time when, among the ancient Greeks, picture-writing had not as yet been super- seded by word-writing, in the tale of Bellerophon, whom Prcetus would not kill, but he sent him into Lycia, and gave him baneful signs, graving on a folded tablet many soul-de- stroying things, and bade him show them to the king, that he might perish at his hands. Tltpne 8e piv AvKirjvbe, nopev 6° oye (rrjpaTa Xvypa, Tpa^ras iv tt'ivciki 7ttvktco 6vpo(pB6pa 7roAXa, Aei^at 6° rjvayyei a> nevdepco, 6