MODES OF INTERPRETATION. 



It is obvious that before attempting the interpretation of pictographs, 

 concerning which no direct information is to be obtained, there, should 

 be a full collection of known characters, in order that through them 

 the unknown may be learned. When any considerable number of ob- 

 jects in a pictograph are actually known, the remainder may be ascer- 

 tained by the context, the relation, and the position of the several 

 designs, and sometimes by the recognized principles of the art. 



The Bureau of Ethnology has been engaged, therefore, for a consid- 

 erable time in collating a large number of characters in a card-catalogue 

 arranged primarily by similarity in forms, and in attaching to each char- 

 acter any significance ascertained or suggested. As before explained, 

 the interpretation upon which reliance is mainl\ based is that which 

 has been made known by direct information from Indians who them- 

 selves were actually makers of pictographs at the time of giving the 

 interpretation. Apart from the comparisons obtained by this collation, 

 the only mode of ascertaining the meaning of the characters, in other 

 words, the only key yet discovered, is in the study of the gesture-sign 

 included in many of them. The writer several years ago suggested that 

 among people where a system of ideographic gesture-signs prevailed, it 

 would be expected that their form would appear in any mode of artistic 

 representation made by the same people with the object of conveying 

 ideas or recording facts. When a gesture-sign had been established 

 and it became necessary or desirable to draw a character or design to 

 convey the same ideas, nothing could be more natural than to use the 

 graphic form or delineation which was known and used in the gesture- 

 sign. It was but one more step, and an easy one, to fasten upon bark, 

 skins, or rocks the evanescent air pictures of the signs. 



The industrious research of Dr. D. CI. Brintou, whose recent work, 

 The Lenape and their Legends, before mentioned, is received as this 

 paper passes through the press, has discovered passages in Rafinesque's 

 generally neglected and perhaps unduly discredited volumes, by which 

 that eccentric but acute writer seems to have announced the general 

 proposition thai the graphic signs of the Indians correspond to their 

 manual signs. He also asserted that he had collected a large number 

 of them, though the statement is not clear, for if all Indian pictographs 

 are, in a very general sense, -'based upon their language of signs," all 

 of those pictographs might be included in his alleged collection, without 

 an ascertained specific relation between any pictograph and any sign. 

 It is probable, however, that Rafiuesque actually had at least valuable 

 notes on the subject, the loss of which is greatly to be regretted. 



233 



