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Updated: May 11, 2025
Plainly names of the totem sort are well suited to the convenience of savages, who converse much in gesture-language.
I do not know whether it has been observed that the totems are, as a rule, objects which may be easily drawn or tattooed, and still more easily indicated in gesture-language. In mentioning the Snakes, the hand imitates the crawling motion of the serpent, and the fingers pointed up behind the ear denote the Wolves.
Indeed, we may, perhaps, go even further, and believe that as gesture-language was earlier than speech, so the earliest rites were conducted wholly by means of ritual acts or gestures; and that it was only in course of time, and as a consequence of the development of language, that verbal formulae came to be used to give fuller expression to the emotions which prompted the rites.
Hence they were at once simple and short, seasoned with as many coarse jests as could be crowded into a limited compass, with plenty of music, dancing, and expressive gesture-language. Their plot was always the same, and never failed to please; it struck the key-note of all decaying societies, the discomfiture of the husband by the wife.
Her response to this was spontaneous. The warmth of her fingers invaded him. Her eyes were full of questioning. He gave a hearty sign of admiration. She flushed with pleasure, but made a naive, protesting gesture. She was deaf and dumb. Hilton had once a sister who was a mute. He knew that amazing primal gesture-language of the silent race, whom God has sent like one-winged birds into the world.
Of the part of the Letter that concerns gesture, one can only say that it appears astonishingly crude to those who know the progress that has been made since Diderot's time in collecting and generalising the curious groups of fact connected with gesture-language.
With drill or flint he became the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually his excited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, the horse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings in the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the bread-fruit, and the coco-nut.
He was then thinking that it was the most intelligent hand he had ever seen. . . . He determined to play a bold and surprising game. He had learned from her the alphabet of the fingers that is, how to spell words. He knew little gesture-language. He, therefore, spelled slowly: "Hawley is angry, because you love Hilton." The statement was so matter-of-fact, so sudden, that the girl had no chance.
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