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.
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.
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.
A small collection of Australian signs has been extracted from R. Brough Smyth's The Aborigines of Victoria, London, 1878.