[Illustration:  Fig. 147.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 148.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 149.]

The Egyptian character, Fig. 148, which in its linear form is represented in Fig. 149, and meaning to go, to come, locomotion, is presented to show readers unfamiliar with hieroglyphics how a corporeal action may be included in a linear character without being obvious or at least certain, unless it should be made clear by comparison with the full figurative form or by other means.  This linear form might be noticed many times without certainty or perhaps suspicion that it represented the human legs and feet in the act of walking.  The same difficulty, of course, as also the same prospect of success by careful research, attends the tracing of other corporeal motions which more properly come under the head of gesture signs.

SIGN LANGUAGE WITH REFERENCE TO GRAMMAR.

Apart from the more material and substantive relations between signs and language, it is to be expected that analogies can by proper research be ascertained between their several developments in the manner of their use, that is, in their grammatic mechanism, and in the genesis of the sentence.  The science of language, ever henceforward to be studied historically, must take account of the similar early mental processes in which the phrase or sentence originated, both in sign and oral utterance.  In this respect, as in many others, the North American Indians may be considered to be living representatives of prehistoric man.

SYNTAX.

The reader will understand without explanation that there is in the gesture speech no organized sentence such as is integrated in the languages of civilization, and that he must not look for articles or particles or passive voice or case or grammatic gender, or even what appears in those languages as a substantive or a verb, as a subject or a predicate, or as qualifiers or inflexions.  The sign radicals, without being specifically any of our parts of speech, may be all of them in turn.  There is, however, a grouping and sequence of the ideographic pictures, an arrangement of signs in connected succession, which may be classed under the scholastic head of syntax.  This subject, with special reference to the order of deaf-mute signs as compared with oral speech, has been the theme of much discussion, some notes of which, condensed from the speculations of M. Remi Valade and others, follow in the next paragraph without further comment than may invite attention to the profound remark of LEIBNITZ.