48 EOYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



" And do thou see," said Poibiaw, " what countless lierds and flocks- 

 of cattle and sheep I have, depasturing thy field ? " 



■' AVhere are they ? " said Xynniaw. 



" "Wh3% the whole host of stars which thou seest," said Peibiaw, " and 

 each of golden effulgence, with the moon for their shepherdess to super- 

 intend their wanderings.' 



" They shall not graze in my pasture,"' said Nynniaw. 



" They shall,' said Peibiaw. 



" They shall not,"' said one ; " they shall," said the other, repeatedly 

 in bandied contradiction, until at last it arose to wild contention between 

 them, and from contention it came to furious war. At length, when 

 the}' were tired out, Khitta Gawr, the giant, vanquished them, and added 

 their, beards to the fur lining of his cloak. A great deal of archaeological 

 and other ological discussion is of the '' you shall — you shan't " order, 

 but there is a more excellent way. I submit a threefold proof of the 

 statement that the aborigines of America formerly possessed written 

 characters of definite phonetic value, which were not pictographs, 

 although in two cases out of the three they were hierogl37jhics. 



"When, after the conquest, the Spanish missionaries began their work 

 among the more intelligent of the Mexicans, they found them in posses- 

 sion of a system of hieroglyphic syllabic writing. The hieroglyphics 

 were representations generally of natural, but sometimes of artificial 

 objects, the former including animal, vegetable and mineral forms, and 

 parts of the human body. As the missionaries read to their converts the 

 Latin prayei-s of the church, their converts set them down upon native 

 paper in their nearest Aztec equivalents : thus — 



m, 



<£nr4 Vf i^"T-^ 



^JU V 



These four symbols are a flag, in Aztec jjantli, a conventional repre- 

 sentation of a stone, teti, an Indian tig, nochtli, and the stone repeated. 

 Taking the first syllable, consisting of a consonant and an op)en vowel, 

 fi-om each of these, they give pate note, which is as near to the Spanish 

 pronunciation of Fater noster as the Aztec, which has no "r," could come. 

 The Spaniards found the Mexicans in possession of this hieroglyphic syl- 

 labary, and in it they wrote out the long ofiices of the Church. School- 

 crutt did not know this, and probably was not to blame for his ignorance, 

 but he was to blame for making his imperfect knowledge the measure of 

 truth. His ai-gument is virtually the same as that of those who deny the 

 possibility of miracles and divine revelation : what we have not witnessed 

 never was nor can be. 



