“Pass the arched hand forward from the lower part of the face, to illustrate elongated nose and mouth; then, with both forefingers extended, remaining fingers and thumbs closed, place them upon either side of the lower jaw, pointing upwards, to show lower canines, at the same time accompanying the gesture with an expression of withdrawing the lips so as to show the teeth snarling; then, with the fingers of the right hand extended and separated throw them quickly forward and slightly upward (voice or talking).” Here, be it observed, how elaborate is this pictorial method of designating a dog barking as compared with the use of two words; and after all it is not so efficient, for the signs were misunderstood by the Indians to whom they were shown—the meaning assigned to them being that of a growling bear. What a large expenditure of thought is required for the devising and the interpretation of such ideograms! and, when they are formed and understood, how cumbersome do they appear if contrasted with words! Colonel Mallery, indeed, says of gesture-language that, “when highly cultivated, its rapidity on familiar subjects exceeds that of speech, and approaches to that of thought itself;” but, besides the important limitation “on familiar subjects,” he adds,—“at the same time it must be admitted that great increase in rapidity is chiefly obtained by the system of preconcerted abbreviations before explained, and by the adoption of arbitrary forms, in which naturalness is sacrificed and conventionality established.”[89] But besides being cumbersome, gesture-language labours under the more serious defect of not being so precise, and the still more serious defect of not being so serviceable as spoken language in the development of abstraction. We have previously seen how words, being more or less purely conventional as signs, are not tied down, as it were, to material objects; although they have doubtless all originated as expressive of sensuous perceptions, not being necessarily ideographic, they may easily pass into signs of general ideas, and end by becoming expressive of the highest abstractions. “Words are thus the easily manipulated counters of thought,” and so, to change the metaphor, are the progeny of generalization. But gestures, in being always more or less ideographic, are much more closely chained to sensuous perceptions; and, therefore, it is only when exercised on “familiar subjects” that they can fairly be said to rival words as a means of expression, while they can never soar into the thinner medium of high abstraction. No sign-talker, with any amount of time at his disposal, could translate into the language of gesture a page of Kant.