FACULTY m ABORIGINAL EACES. 99 



tion of subjects in wliicli langiiagt' fails him. He will take a burnt slick and draw a map 

 iudicatiug- the route that has to be takeu, the portages ou a river, or the trail through the 

 forest, after he has failed by signs and gestures to convey his meaning ; and he can inter- 

 pret with ease the drawings of Indians of other tribes. When camping out on the Nepi- 

 gon Eiver in 1866, with Indian guides from the Saskatchewan, who were strangers to the 

 locality, they interpreted the drawings or carvings on a. soft metamorphic rock overlaid 

 by the syenite of that district ; and were able thereby to tell us who had preceded them, 

 and to determine the route we should take. Lieutenant Whipple in the narration of his 

 route near the thirty-fifth parallel, remarks : " Near the Llano Extacado were seen Pueblo 

 Indians from San Domingo. After an introductory smoke they became cjuite communica- 

 tive, furnishing curious information as to their traditions and peculiar faith. When ques- 

 tioned regarding the numbers and positions of the Pueblos in New Mexico, they rudely 

 traced upon the ground a sketch from which a map of the country is reproduced in the 

 Government Reports." ' The Eev. Dr. O'Meara, for many years a missionary among the 

 Ojibwa}'- Indians of Lake Superior, thus writes to me : " The Indians were always pic- 

 torial, exen in common conversation, i.e., they liked to explain what they meant bj' mak- 

 ing figures ; and always, if you asked one of them for information as to the route to any 

 place, he would make a rough map of it, either on the sand or on a piece of birch bark." 

 This fully accords with my own experience. I have repeatedly seen Indian guides take 

 a piece of birch bark and indicate on it some idea otherwise inexpressible from oirr igno- 

 rance of any common language. Their map-making must be familiar to all who have 

 travelled m irch with Indian guides. They delineate with much accuracy the leading 

 geographical features of any familiar locality. I have in my note-books sketches made by 

 Indians, when I have placed the pencil in their hand, and indicated by signs some infor- 

 mation I desired to obtain, about game, fishing, or other matters familiar to them ; or about 

 their own tribal relationships, which they generally express in totemic fashion by their 

 symbolic bear, deer, beaver, eagle, turtle, or other animal. Such signs of the clan, tribe, 

 or nation are familiar to eA'ery Indian, as well as the ideographs of his own and 

 others' names ; and when represented on the roll of birch bark, painted on the chiefs buffalo 

 robe, or inverted on his grave-post, they can be interx)reted with the same facility with 

 which an heraldic student discerns the family history on the painted hatchment or the 

 sculptured shields of some noble mausoleum. 



By an alphabet, strictly so called, we understand a series of symbols which have be- 

 come the conventional equivalents to the eye of the sounds Avhich combine to form the 

 speech of a people. But aljilia, beta, etc., were undoubtedly, in their first stage, pictures, 

 and not arbitrary signs ; though they passed undesignedly into the demotic characters of 

 the Egyptian current hand, and were then transformed, from ideographic and syllabic char- 

 acters, into the true i)honetics out of which have come the later alphabets of the civilized 

 world. Egypt is justly credited with the origination of a system of writing which lies 

 at the foundation of all our inherited knowledge, and which, as Bacon says, " makes 

 ages so distant to x:)articipate of the wisdom, illuminations and inventions, the one of the 

 other." Yet the germ of all this lay in the graphic records of the palaeolithic cave-men ; 

 and the very same process of evolution from pure pictorial representation to pic- 



' Explorations and Surveys, Wasliington, isr)(i, iii. ]n, 30. 



