Abstract

Clark's Sing Language

The article presents information on the book "The Indian Sign Language," by W.P. Clark. The most noticeable point in Captain Clark's volume is that he makes no mention of the large amount of literature that has gathered around the subject of sign language in general. Captain Clark gives in all honesty the signs which he has met, understood, and approved during an experience of six years. His work, as compared with that of the Bureau of Ethnology, illustrates the difference between the individual work of any one man, unprepared by special education for its undertaking, and the combined labor of many observers and students trained in the same methods, and directed to a common object. In all of the publications of the Bureau of Ethnology mentioned, in immediate connection with the description of a sign appears the tribe or tribes in which it is noticed, and the authority therefore, whether collaborator or published work.