has not been otherwise attracted, it has the
countervailing benefit of use when the voice could not be employed.
This may be an advantage at a distance which the eye can reach, but
not the ear, and still more frequently when silence or secrecy is
desired. Dalgarno recommends it for use in the presence of great
people, who ought not to be disturbed, and curiously enough
"Disappearing Mist," the Iroquois chief, speaks of the former
extensive use of signs in his tribe by women and boys as a mark of
respect to warriors and elders, their voices, in the good old days,
not being uplifted in the presence of the latter. The decay of that
wholesome state of discipline, he thinks, accounts partly for the
disappearance of the use of signs among the modern impudent youth and
the dusky claimants of woman's rights.

An instance of the additional power gained to a speaker of ordinary
language by the use of signs, impressed the writer while dictating to
two amanuenses at the same moment, to the one by signs and the other
by words, on different subjects, a practice which would have enabled
Caesar to surpass his celebrated feat. It would also be easy to talk to
a deaf and blind man at once, the latter being addressed by the voice
and the former in signs.

_RELATIONS TO PHILOLOGY._

The aid to be derived from the study of sign language in prosecuting
researches into the science of language was pointed out by LEIBNITZ,
in his _Collectanea Etymologica_, without hitherto exciting any
thorough or scientific work in that direction, the obstacle to it
probably being that scholars competent in other respects had no
adequate data of the gesture speech of man to be used in comparison.
The latter will, it is hoped, be supplied by the work now undertaken.

In the first part of this paper it was suggested that signs played an
important part in giving meaning to spoken words. Philology, comparing
the languages of earth in their radicals, must therefore include the
graphic or manual presentation of thought, and compare the elements of
ideography with those of phonics. Etymology now examines the ultimate
roots, not the fanciful resemblances between oral forms, in the
different tongues; the internal, not the mere external parts of
language. A marked peculiarity of sign language consists in its
limited number of radicals and the infinite combinations into
which those radicals enter while still remaining distinctive. It is
therefore a proper field