“The wishes and emotions of very young children are conveyed in a small number of sounds, but in a great variety of gestures and facial expressions. A child’s gestures are intelligent long in advance of speech; although very early and persistent attempts are made to give it instruction in the latter but none in the former, from the time when it begins _risu cognoscere matrem_. It learns words only as they are taught, and learns them through the medium of signs which are not expressly taught. Long after familiarity with speech, it consults the gestures and facial expressions of its parents and nurses, as if seeking thus to translate or explain their words. These facts are important in reference to the biologic law that the order of development of the individual is the same as that of the species.... The insane understand and obey gestures when they have no knowledge whatever of words. It is also found that semi-idiotic children who cannot be taught more than the merest rudiments of speech can receive a considerable amount of information through signs, and can express themselves by them. Sufferers from aphasia continue to use appropriate gestures. A stammerer, too, works his arms and features as if determined to get his thoughts out, in a manner not only suggestive of the physical struggle, but of the use of gestures as a hereditary expedient.” Words, then, in so far as they are not intentionally imitative of other sounds, and so approximate to gestures, are essentially more conventional than are tones immediately expressive of emotions, or bodily actions which appeal to the eye, and which, in so far as they are intentionally significant, are made, as far as possible, intentionally pictorial. Therefore, either to make or to understand these more conventional signs requires a higher order of mental evolution; and on this account it is that we everywhere find the language of tone and gesture preceding that of articulate speech, as at once the more simple, more natural, and therefore more _primitive_ means of conveying receptual ideas. We find the same general truth exemplified in the fact that the language of tone and gesture is always resorted to by men who do not understand each others’ articulate speech; and although among the races in which gesture-language has been carried to its highest degree of elaboration most of the signs employed have become more or less conventional, in the main they are still pictorial. This is directly proved, without the need of special analysis, by the fact that the members of such races are able to communicate with one another in a manner so singularly complete that to an onlooker the result seems almost magical.