forms of inventive symbolism, and point to an instinct of interpretation akin to the fine scent and keen logic of the Indian senses.[1] These are the hieroglyphics of the wild; some of them as well done as the Egyptian, and far better than the old Chinese picture-signs. To these goes the complex experience of the nomad in definite wholes, familiar to his fellows.[2] These are his simple science and his intuitive poetry: their metaphoric meaning is his natural history, raised into the language of feeling and imagination, and the morality of fable. He has done more than picture objects: this is dramatic combination. To find mere copying without conscious symbolism, we must, perhaps, go back to the "Stone Epoch," in which quite respectable figures of animals are found, though wanting afterwards in the "Bronze."[3] It is at least a poetic, if not positively historic, theory of the origin of the Gaelic alphabet, the letters of which were named from plants or trees, that these characters represented symbolical knots and ties formed from branching twigs, by which knowledge was conveyed, and which had been the mystic hieroglyph of the druid and the bard.[4] Many have questioned the opinion of Oppert, that all the cuneiform signs (as well as the Egyptian and Chinese) are transformed ideograms, on the ground that this would leave no room for the element of arbitrary invention; but there is quite evidence enough to prove that, as a whole, ideographic evolution is the main factor in the written languages of mankind.
The quipus or knotted cords, used in primitive China, and at a more advanced stage in Peru, are an appeal to
- ↑ In the Indian petition to the President of the United States in 1849, the unity of purpose of the seven chiefs is expressed by lines passing from one to the others, and their persons by the animals from which their names were derived (Schoolcraft). Something similar is said to have been preserved in Egyptian inscriptions.
- ↑ Rude tribes of Central Africa communicate in this way. De Rosny, Écritures Figuratives, &c. (1870) p. 38.
- ↑ Lubbock, Prim. Cond. of Man, pp. 28-30 (Am. ed.).
- ↑ Logan, Scottish Gael.
