[Illustration:  Fig. 232.]

Wied’s sign for medicine is “Stir with the right hand into the left, and afterward blow into the latter.”  All persons familiar with the Indians will understand that the term “medicine,” foolishly enough adopted by both French and English to express the aboriginal magic arts, has no therapeutic significance.  Very few even pretended remedies were administered to the natives and probably never by the professional shaman, who worked by incantation, often pulverizing and mixing the substances mystically used, to prevent their detection.  The same mixtures were employed in divination.  The author particularly mentions Mandan ceremonies, in which a white “medicine” stone, as hard as pyrites, was produced by rubbing in the hand snow or the white feathers of a bird.  The blowing away of the disease, considered to be introduced by a supernatural power foreign to the body, was a common part of the juggling performance.

A sign for stone is as follows:  With the back of the arched right hand (H) strike repeatedly in the palm of the left, held horizontal, back outward, at the height of the breast and about a foot in front; the ends of the fingers point in opposite directions. (Dakota I.) From its use when the stone was the only hammer.

A suggestive sign for knife is reported, viz:  Cut past the mouth with the raised right hand. (Wied.) This probably refers to the general practice of cutting off food, as much being crammed into the mouth as can be managed and then separated from the remaining mass by a stroke of a knife.  This is specially the usage with fat and entrails, the Indian delicacies.

An old sign for tomahawk, ax, is as follows:  Cross the arms and slide the edge of the right hand, held vertically, down over the left arm. (Wied.) This is still employed, at least for a small hatchet, or “dress tomahawk,” and would be unintelligible without special knowledge.  The essential point is laying the extended right hand in the bend of the left elbow.  The sliding down over the left arm is an almost unavoidable but quite unnecessary accompaniment to the sign, which indicates the way in which the hatchet is usually carried.  Pipes, whips, bows and arrows, fans, and other dress or emblematic articles of the “buck” are seldom or never carried in the bend of the left elbow as is the ax.  The pipe is usually held in the left hand.

The following sign for Indian village is given by Wied:  Place the open thumb and forefinger of each hand opposite to each other, as if to make a circle, but leaving between them a small interval; afterward move them from above downward simultaneously.  The villages of the tribes with which the author was longest resident, particularly the Mandans and Arikaras, were surrounded by a strong circular stockade, spaces or breaks in the circle being left for entrance or exit.