threw herself into his arms in acceptance.  The experience of travelers on the Plains is to the same general effect, that signs commonly used to men are understood by women in a sense so different as to occasion embarrassment.  So necessary was it to strike the mental key-note of the spectators by adapting their minds to time, place, and circumstance, that even in the palmiest days of pantomime it was customary for the crier to give some short preliminary explanation of what was to be acted, which advantage is now retained by our play-bills, always more specific when the performance is in a foreign language, unless, indeed, the management is interested in the sale of librettos.

GESTURES OF OUR PUBLIC SPEAKERS.

If the scenic gestures are so seldom significant, those appropriate to oratory are of course still less so.  They require energy, variety, and precision, but also a degree of simplicity which is incompatible with the needs of sign language.  As regards imitation, they are restrained within narrow bounds and are equally suited to a great variety of sentiments.  Among the admirable illustrations in Austin’s Chironomia of gestures applicable to the several passages in Gay’s “Miser and Plutus” one is given for “But virtue’s sold” which is perfectly appropriate, but is not in the slightest degree suggestive either of virtue or of the transaction of sale.  It could be used for an indefinite number of thoughts or objects which properly excited abhorrence, and therefore without the words gives no special interpretation.  Oratorical delivery demands general grace—­cannot rely upon the emotions of the moment for spontaneous appropriateness, and therefore requires preliminary study and practice, such as are applied to dancing and fencing with a similar object; indeed, accomplishment in both dancing and fencing has been recommended as of use to all orators.  In reference to this subject a quotation from Lord Chesterfield’s letters is in place:  “I knew a young man, who, being just elected a member of Parliament, was laughed at for being discovered, through the key-hole of his chamber door, speaking to himself in the glass and forming his looks and gestures.  I could not join in that laugh, but, on the contrary, thought him much wiser than those that laughed at him, for he knew the importance of those little graces in a public assembly and they did not.”

OUR INDIAN CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO SIGN LANGUAGE.

In no other thoroughly explored part of the world has there been found spread over so large a space so small a number of individuals divided by so many linguistic and dialectic boundaries as in North America.  Many wholly distinct tongues have for an indefinitely long time been confined to a few scores of speakers, verbally incomprehensible to all others on the face of the earth who did not, from some rarely operating