by careful research, attends the tracing of other corporeal
motions which more properly come under the head of gesture signs.

_SIGN LANGUAGE WITH REFERENCE TO GRAMMAR._

Apart from the more material and substantive relations between signs
and language, it is to be expected that analogies can by proper
research be ascertained between their several developments in the
manner of their use, that is, in their grammatic mechanism, and in the
genesis of the sentence. The science of language, ever henceforward to
be studied historically, must take account of the similar early mental
processes in which the phrase or sentence originated, both in sign and
oral utterance. In this respect, as in many others, the North American
Indians may be considered to be living representatives of prehistoric
man.

SYNTAX.

The reader will understand without explanation that there is in the
gesture speech no organized sentence such as is integrated in the
languages of civilization, and that he must not look for articles or
particles or passive voice or case or grammatic gender, or even what
appears in those languages as a substantive or a verb, as a subject
or a predicate, or as qualifiers or inflexions. The sign radicals,
without being specifically any of our parts of speech, may be all
of them in turn. There is, however, a grouping and sequence of the
ideographic pictures, an arrangement of signs in connected succession,
which may be classed under the scholastic head of syntax. This
subject, with special reference to the order of deaf-mute signs as
compared with oral speech, has been the theme of much discussion, some
notes of which, condensed from the speculations of M. Remi Valade and
others, follow in the next paragraph without further comment than may
invite attention to the profound remark of LEIBNITZ.

In mimic construction there are to be considered both the order in
which the signs succeed one another and the relative positions in
which they are made, the latter remaining longer in the memory than
the former, and spoken language may sometimes in its early infancy
have reproduced the ideas of a sign picture without commencing from
the same point. So the order, as in Greek and Latin, is very variable.
In nations among whom the alphabet was introduced without the
intermediary to any impressive degree of picture-writing, the order
being (1) language of signs, almost superseded by (2) spoken language,
and (3) alphabetic writing