Yorkshire is not able to communicate readily with the equally
uneducated man of Somersetshire. This is the true distinction to
be made. A thorough sign talker would be able to talk with several
Indians who have no signs in common, and who, if their knowledge of
signs were only memorized, could not communicate together. So also, as
an educated Englishman will understand the attempts of a foreigner to
speak in very imperfect and broken English, a good Indian sign expert
will apprehend the feeble efforts of a tyro in gestures. But Colonel
Dodge's conclusion that there is but one true Indian sign language,
just as there is but one true English language, is not proved unless
it can be shown that a much larger proportion of the Indians who
use signs at all, than present researches show to be the case, use
identically the same signs to express the same ideas. It would also
seem necessary to the parallel that the signs so used should be
absolute, if not arbitrary, as are the words of an oral language, and
not independent of preconcert and self-interpreting at the instant of
their invention or first exhibition, as all true signs must originally
have been and still measurably remain. All Indians, as all gesturing
men, have many natural signs in common and many others which are now
conventional. The conventions by which the latter were established
occurred during long periods, when the tribes forming them were
so separated as to have established altogether diverse customs and
mythologies, and when the several tribes were with such different
environment as to have formed varying conceptions needing appropriate
sign expression. The old error that the North American Indians
constitute one homogeneous race is now abandoned. Nearly all the
characteristics once alleged as segregating them from the rest of
mankind have proved not to belong to the whole of the pre-Columbian
population, but only to those portions of it first explored. The
practice of scalping is not now universal, even among the tribes
least influenced by civilization, if it ever was, and therefore the
cultivation of the scalp-lock separated from the rest of the hair
of the head, or with the removal of all other hair, is not a general
feature of their appearance. The arrangement of the hair is so
different among tribes as to be one of the most convenient modes for
their pictorial distinction. The war paint, red in some tribes, was
black in others; the mystic rites of the ca