man or to another Indian using signs which he
never saw before, catches the meaning of that which is presented and
adapts himself to it, at least for the occasion. Even when he finds
that his interlocutor insists upon understanding and presenting a
certain sign in a manner and with a significance widely different from
those to which he has been accustomed, it is within the very nature,
tentative and elastic, of the gesture art--both performers being on an
equality--that he should adopt the one that seems to be recognized
or that is pressed upon him, as with much greater difficulty he
has learned and adopted many foreign terms used with whites before
attempting to acquire their language, but never with his own race.
Thus there is now, and perhaps always has been, what may be called a
_lingua-franca_, in the sign vocabulary. It is well known that all the
tribes of the Plains having learned by experience that white visitors
expect to receive certain signs really originating with the latter,
use them in their intercourse just as they sometimes do the words
"squaw" and "papoose," corruptions of the Algonkian, and once as
meaningless in the present West as the English terms "woman" and
"child," but which the first pioneers, having learned them on the
Atlantic coast, insisted upon treating as generally intelligible.

The perversity in attaching through preconceived views a wrong
significance to signs is illustrated by an anecdote found in several
versions and in several languages, but repeated as a veritable Scotch
legend by Duncan Anderson, esq., Principal of the Glasgow Institution
for the Deaf and Dumb, when he visited Washington in 1853.

King James I. of England, desiring to play a trick upon the Spanish
ambassador, a man of great erudition, but who had a crotchet in his
head upon sign language, informed him that there was a distinguished
professor of that science in the university at Aberdeen. The
ambassador set out for that place, preceded by a letter from the King
with instructions to make the best of him. There was in the town
one Geordy, a butcher, blind of one eye, a fellow of much wit and
drollery. Geordy is told to play the part of a professor, with the
warning not to speak a word; is gowned, wigged, and placed in a chair
of state, when the ambassador is shown in and they are left alone
together. Presently the nobleman came out greatly pleased with the
experiment, claiming that his theory was demonstrated. He sa