640 MATERIALS TO WRITE UPON BEFORE INVENTION OF PRINTING. 



We can not here relate the history of the evohition of the various 

 styles of writing; the aim of these pages is to make known the 

 materials that have been used to write upon. 



In giving the history of the materials and processes which have 

 brought down to us the annals and ideas of humanity, this description 

 of the methods adopted by man to develop the expression of an idea 

 and to make that idea penetrate simultaneously the intelligence of 

 the human species becomes a history of humanity itself. 



Do we not return to the source of this humanity, of its beginnings 

 and its progress in civilization, in seeking the manner in which 

 thought came to be fixed in tangible form and transmitted through 

 the ages? Before the first peoples with a history — the Egyptians, 

 Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Chinese, Hindoos, American Indians — 

 research is little more than hypothesis. An impenetrable obscurity 

 rests over those distant times in which man was concerned only with 

 his material wants. 



Man looked round al)Out him. From the first nature otfered him 

 products which asked only to be utilized. Stones and marble, metals, 

 wood, the bark of trees and their leaves, the skins of animals and 

 their intestines, tissues, and artificial products of all kinds contempo- 



FiG. 1. Wampum. 



raucously or successively receiv^ed the impress of sculpture, painting, 

 or the inscription of human actions and thoughts. In every case 

 where it is possible to cite an example wx^ shall do so. Some figures 

 Avhich complement the facts adduced, and will perhaps be helpful to a 

 comprehension of the subject, have been scattered through the text. 



But before starting in on any methodical plan we must speak of 

 some mnemonic devices which bear a distant relation to writing. 

 They Avere, how^cver, intended to perpetuate the memory of the deeds 

 or condition of an individual. 



Wampum (fig. 1), a sort of collar or belt, nuide of dilferent col- 

 ored shells arranged in a definite order and presenting geometrical 

 figures, signs which were all symbolic and significant, was utilized 

 by a part of the Indian tribes of the United States, Canada, and 

 Central America. According to Stearnes, wampum was employed 

 as money by the aborigines of the Carolina's, Virginia, etc." 



The Peruvians and the greater part of the dilferent j^eoples of 



a Smithsonian Report, Museum, 1S87, p. 304 et seq. 



