of reading off speech from the telegraphic communication undoubtedly
varies widely with the individual. It is even conceivable, if not
exactly likely, that certain operators may have learned to think
directly, so far as the purely conscious part of the process of thought
is concerned, in terms of the tick-auditory symbolism or, if they happen
to have a strong natural bent toward motor symbolism, in terms of the
correlated tactile-motor symbolism developed in the sending of
telegraphic messages.

Still another interesting group of transfers are the different gesture
languages, developed for the use of deaf-mutes, of Trappist monks vowed
to perpetual silence, or of communicating parties that are within seeing
distance of each other but are out of earshot. Some of these systems are
one-to-one equivalences of the normal system of speech; others, like
military gesture-symbolism or the gesture language of the Plains Indians
of North America (understood by tribes of mutually unintelligible forms
of speech) are imperfect transfers, limiting themselves to the rendering
of such grosser speech elements as are an imperative minimum under
difficult circumstances. In these latter systems, as in such still more
imperfect symbolisms as those used at sea or in the woods, it may be
contended that language no longer properly plays a part but that the
ideas are directly conveyed by an utterly unrelated symbolic process or
by a quasi-instinctive imitativeness. Such an interpretation would be
erroneous. The intelligibility of these vaguer symbolisms can hardly be
due to anything but their automatic and silent translation into the
terms of a fuller flow of speech.

We shall no doubt conclude that all voluntary communication of ideas,
aside from normal speech, is either a transfer, direct or indirect, from
the typical symbolism of language as spoken and heard or, at the least,