240 CRITICAL NOTICES I right to his own conception of the scope of his task. But Prof. Wundt offers little encouragement to his readers. It is a thorny path that leads to his inner shrine, and would-be disciples tread it with bleeding feet. Nearly 1,300 pages of pale German ink on the most exasperating German glazed paper the physical discomfort of reading them might easily damp the most ardent enthusiasm!
So far as it goes, the first part of this volume is in many ways admirable. It maps out the development of means of expression from the natural expression of the emotions, through gesture- language, up to articulate speech ; and thanks to the insight gained into the processes involved in the most primitive methods of expression, Wundt is able to offer most suggestive hypotheses on many interesting problems of the evolution of spoken sounds and the formation of words. The general account of the expres- sion of the emotions is full and good. In view of recent sphygmo- graphic and plethysmographic work in Germany and in America it would certainly appear that his treatment of the vasomotor intensity-symptoms is much too simple and definite. The Chapter on gesture-language, in which he examines one after another the sign-systems of the deaf-mutes, whether natural or artificial, the gestures of savages, of Cistercian monks, and of European peoples such as the Neapolitans, is of the highest interest. Prof. Wundt is at his best as an expositor ; and this chapter is a model of exposi- tion. He divides gestures into two fundamental classes : indicative (hinweiseri) and representative (darstelleri) which latter species includes three classes: the imitative (nachbilden) the significant (mitbezeichnen) and the symbolic. The first are a plastic repre- sentation of the whole object or of some striking feature of the object, the second designate the object by means of some one of its qualities or marks, the third are either direct or indirect sym- bols of ideas. All these kinds of gestures are admirably exhibited as steps in a progressive development. There is nothing to add to Prof. Wundt's classification, and- it may be looked upon as final. The sections on the change of meaning of gestures are also full of suggestiveness. But the section on the Syntax of gesture- language, reliable and accurate as it is, cannot be said to add any- thing to Dr. Tylor's account in his Early History of Mankind. Most unhappily, that same practical interest to which, as Wundt remarks, we have in the past been indebted for all we know of deaf-mute gesture-language, has in the last two decades prevented any addition to the material at our disposal. For the psychologist, at least, the decay of the old system of educating deaf-mutes has had disastrous effects. The natural gesture-language still exists in the home, and in the playground, if not in the class-room, but there is scarce any one willing or competent to observe it. Wundt notes the analogies between deaf-mute gesture syntax, and the syntax of Amerind gesture-language as described by Mallery ; shows the development of gesture-language in general out of
