Grateful acknowledgment must be made to Prof.  E.A.  FAY, of the National Deaf Mute College, through whose special attention a large number of the natural signs of deaf-mutes, remembered by them as having been invented and used before instruction in conventional signs, indeed before attending any school, was obtained.  The gentlemen who made the contributions in their own MS., and without prompting, are as follows:  Messrs. M. BALLARD, R.M.  ZIEGLER, J. CROSS, PHILIP J. HASENSTAB, and LARS LARSON.  Their names respectively follow their several descriptions.  Mr. BALLARD is an instructor in the college, and the other gentlemen were pupils during the session of 1880.

Similar thanks are due to Mr. J.L.  NOYES, superintendent of the Minnesota Institution for the education of the Deaf and Dumb, Faribault, Minn., and to Messrs. GEORGE WING and D.H.  CARROLL, teachers in that institution, for annotations and suggestions respecting deaf-mute signs.  The notes made by the last named gentlemen are followed by their respective names in reference.

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Special thanks are also rendered to Prof.  JAMES D. BUTLER, of Madison, Wis., for contribution of Italian gesture-signs, noted by him in 1843, and for many useful suggestions.

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Other Italian signs are quoted from the Essay on Italian gesticulations by his eminence Cardinal WISEMAN, in his Essays on Various Subjects, London, 1855, Vol.  III, pp. 533-555.  Many Neapolitan signs are extracted from the illustrated work of the canon ANDREA DE JORIO, La Mimica degli Antichi investigata nel gestire Napoletano, Napoli, 1832.

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A small collection of Australian signs has been extracted from R. BROUGH SMYTH’s The Aborigines of Victoria, London, 1878.

EXTRACTS FROM DICTIONARY.

In the printed but unpublished Collection before mentioned, page 396, nearly three hundred quarto pages are devoted to descriptions of signs arranged in alphabetic order.  A few of these are now presented to show the method adopted.  They have been selected either as having connection with the foregoing discussion of the subject or because for some of them pictorial illustrations had already been prepared.  There is propriety in giving all the signs under some of the title words when descriptions of only one or two of those signs have been used in the foregoing remarks.  This prevents an erroneous inference that the signs so mentioned are the only or the common or the generally prevailing signs for the idea conveyed.  This course has involved some slight repetition both of descriptions and of illustrations, as it seemed desirable that they should appear to the eye in the several connections indicated.  The extracts are rendered less interesting and instructive by the necessity for omitting cross-references