Two hunters have gone up the river on an expedition, and have killed a bear and taken many fish. They endeavour to commemorate their success, and make it known to whosoever shall pass that way after them, by a monument raised upon the spot. On a piece of wood they draw two boats, and over each the totem, or symbolic animal, indicating the family to which each hunter respectively belongs—his surname, as it were. The figures of a bear and of half-a-dozen fish tell the rest of the simple story. There is here no idea of a narrative, of an orderly setting forth of the successive incidents making up an act or occurrence: the whole complex is put before the eye at once, unanalyzed, in the form in which we might suppose it to lie in the mind of a brute—or, more properly, as it would lie in the mind of a man destitute of language, and lacking that education in progressive thought which the possession and use of language give; it abnegates, in short, the advantages conferred by language, and is confusedly synthetic, like the conceptions of an untaught human being. It offers but one element implying a possibility of something higher—namely, the totems, which are signs, not for things, but for the conventional and communicable names of things: here is contained in embryo the idea of a written language representing speech, and such might be made to grow out of it, if the picture-writers had but the acuteness to perceive it, and the ingenuity to make the conversion.
The pictorial mode of writing is analogous with that primitive stage of language in which all signs are still onomatopoetic, immediately suggestive of the conceptions they designate, and therefore, with due allowance for the habits and knowledge of those who use them, intelligible without instruction. To the most prominent and important difference between the two allusion was made in the last lecture: in virtue of the character of the medium through which communication is made, the earliest written signs denote concrete objects, while the earliest spoken signs denote the acts and qualities of objects.
One of the American nations, the Mexican, had brought the art of picture-writing to a high state of perfection,
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