382 The Smithsonian Institution 



acquire a denotive meaning, and some of them became 

 almost arbitrary. Colonel Mallery's memoir on this subject, 

 forming the body of the tenth annual report, has been favor- 

 ably received in this and other countries. The researches 

 in pictography illustrate the mode of origin of graphic art, 

 both linguistic and decorative ; and the laws and stages of 

 development exemplified by both signals and pictographs 

 are in harmony with those illustrated in the development of 

 speech. 



The development of decorative art, which has been investi- 

 gated by Professor Holmes and others, has been found mea- 

 surably coincident with that of pictography on the one hand 

 and that of hieroglyphics on the other, though the designs, 

 always more or less definitely symbolic at the outset, were 

 modified to fit the conditions residing in the medium or sur- 

 face by which they were displayed. For this reason symbols 

 carved on arrow-shafts became elongated, and symbols repre- 

 sented by patterns in woven fabrics became angular, while 

 one of the consequences of the use of symbols in decoration 

 was the development of arbitrary forms and the strengthen- 

 ing of the denotive tendency. Of the score of reports re- 

 lating to this subject, that prepared by Professor Holmes in 

 1885 i s > perhaps, the most noteworthy. 1 The influence of 

 decorative art on the development of writing cannot be neg- 

 lected, and the results of the researches concerning decoration 

 are in accord with those flowing from the study of phonetic 

 symbolism. 



In certain groups, notably the Nahuatlan and Mayan, pic- 

 tography was so well advanced at the time of the discovery 

 that the symbols were conventionalized, sometimes into ideo- 

 grams and phonograms, though some retained the original 



1 " A Study of the Textile Art in its Relation to the Development of Form and Orna- 

 ment," in Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1888, pages 189-252. 



