POWELL. ] ETCHINGS—PAINTINGS. 75 
PICTURE-WRITING. 
The pictographs of North America were made on divers substances. 
The bark of trees, tablets of wood, the skins of animals, and the surfaces 
of rocks were all used for this purpose; but the great body of picture- 
writing as preserved to us is found on rock surfaces, as these are the most 
enduring. 
From Dighton Rock to the cliffs that overhang the Pacific, these records 
are found—on bowlders fashioned by the waves of the sea, scattered by 
river floods, or polished by glacial ice; on stones buried in graves and 
mounds; on faces of rock that appear in ledges by the streams; on canon 
walls and towering cliffs ; on mountain crags and the ceilings of caves— 
wherever smooth surfaces of rock are to be found in North America, there 
we may expect to find pictographs. So widely distributed and so vast 
in number, it is well to know what purposes they may serve in anthro- 
pologic science. 
Many of these pictographs are simply pictures, rude etchings, or paint- 
ings, delineating natural objects, especially animals, and illustrate simply 
the beginning of pictorial art; others we know were intended to com- 
memorate events orto represent other ideas entertained by their authors; 
but to a large extent these were simply mnemonic—not conveying ideas 
of themselves, but designed more thoroughly to retain in memory cer- 
tain events or thoughts by persons who were already cognizant of the 
same through current hearsay or tradition. If once the memory of the 
thought to be preserved has passed from the minds of men, the record 
is powerless to restore its own subject-matter to the understanding. 
The great body of picture-writings is thus described ; yet to some slight 
extent pictographs are found with characters more or less conventional, 
and the number of such is quite large in Mexico and Central America. 
Yet even these conventional characters are used with others less con- 
ventional in such a manner that perfect records were never made. 
Hence it will be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictographic 
matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus 
for historic purposes ; but it has a legitimate use of profound interest, 
as these pictographs exhibit the beginning of written language and the 
beginning of pictorial art, yet undifferentiated; and if the scholars of 
America will collect and study the vast body of this material scattered 
every where—over the valleys and on the mountain sides—from it can 
be written one of the most interesting chapters in the early history of 
mankind. 
