for woman consists in laying the hands upon the breast. Now, in order to communicate the idea of 'male teacher,' the hat is first lifted as the above gesture for man, and then the index finger is raised. This is done either because pupils in school raise the index finger to indicate their knowledge of a certain thing or, perhaps, because the teacher occasionally raises his finger when he wishes to command attention or to threaten punishment. Pointing and graphic gestures thus represent the two means which gesture-language employs. Within the second of these classes of gestures, however, we may distinguish a small sub-group that may be called _significant_; in this case, the object is not represented by means of a direct picture, but by incidental characteristics--man, for example, is expressed by lifting the hat. The signs are all directly perceptible. The most important characteristic of gesture-language, as well as the most distinctive feature of an original language, is the fact that there is no trace of abstract concepts, there being merely perceptual representations. And yet some of these representations--and this is a proof of how insistently human thought, even in its beginnings, presses on to the formation of concepts--have acquired a symbolical meaning by virtue of which they become sensuous means, in a certain sense, of expressing concepts which in themselves are not of a perceptual nature. We may here mention only _one_ such gesture, noteworthy because it occurs independently in the language of the European deaf and dumb and in that of the Dakota Indians. 'Truth' is represented by moving the index finger directly forward from the lips, while 'lie' is indicated by a movement towards the right or left. The former is thus held to be a straight speech and the latter a crooked speech, transcriptions which also occur, as poetical expressions, in spoken language. On the whole, however, such symbolical signs are rare if the natural gesture-language has not been artificially reconstructed; moreover, they always remain perceptual in character.