? How can you note a fault in
Raphael's picture of Moses making water gush from the rock? How see that
he has forgotten to have the Israelites raise their shoulders, as they
stand rapt in admiration of the miracle? One versed in the science of
gesture, as he passes before the Saint Michael Fountain, must confess
that the statue of the archangel with its parallel lines, is little
better than the dragon at his feet.

In view of the importance and interest of the language of gesture, we
shall study it thoroughly in the second book of our course.

Chapter II.

Definition and Division of Gesture.

Gesture is the direct agent of the heart, the interpreter of speech. It
is elliptical discourse. Each part of this definition may be easily
justified.

1. _Gesture is the Direct Agent of the Heart._--Look at an infant. For
some time he manifests his joy or sorrow through cries; but these are
not gesture. When he comes to know the cause of his joy or sorrow,
sentiment awakens, his heart opens to love or hatred, and he expresses
his new emotion not by cries alone, nor yet by speech; he smiles upon
his mother, and his first gesture is a smile. Beings endowed only with
the sensitive life, have no smile; animals do not laugh.

This marvelous correspondence of the organs with the sentiment arises
from the close union of soul and body. The brain ministers to the
operations of the soul. Every sentiment must have its echo in the brain,
in order to be unerringly transmitted by the organic apparatus.

_Ex visu cognoscitur vir._ ("The man is known by his face.") The role of
dissimulation is a very difficult one to sustain.

2. _Gesture is the Interpreter of Speech._--Gesture has been given to
man to reveal what speech is powerless to express. For example: _I
love_. This phrase says nothing of the nature of the being loved,
nothing of the fashion in which one loves. Gesture, by a simple
movement, reveals all this, and says it far better than speech, which
would know how to render it only by many successive words and phrases. A
gesture, then, like a ray of light, can reflect all that passes in the
soul.

Hence, if we desire that a thing shall be always remembered, we must not
say it in words; we must let it be divined, revealed by gesture.
Wherever an ellipse is supposable in a discourse, gesture must intervene
to explain this ellipse.

3. _Gesture is an Elliptical Language._--We call ellipse a hidden
meaning whose revelat