MALLERY.] DISTINCTION BETWEEN SIGNS AND SYMBOLS. 389 
enduring form and when merely outlined in the ambient air, all Indian 
gestures, motions, and attitudes might with equal appropriateness be 
called symbolic. While, however, all symbols come under the generic 
head of signs, very few signs are in accurate classification symbols. S. 
T. Coleridge has defined a symbol to be a sign included in the idea it 
represents. This may be intelligible if it is intended that an ordinary 
sign is extraneous. to the concept and, rather than suggested by it, is 
invented to express it by some representation or analogy, while a symbol 
may be evolved by a process of thought from the concept itself; but it is 
no very exhaustive or practically useful distinction. Symbols are less 
obvious and more artificial than mere signs, require convention, are not 
only abstract, but metaphysical, and often need explanation from history, 
religion, and customs. They do not depict but suggest subjects; do not 
speak directly through the eye to the intelligence, but presuppose in the 
mind knowledge of an event or fact which the sign recalls. The symbols 
of the ark, dove, olive branch, and rainbow would be wholly meaning- 
less to people unfamiliar with the Mosaic or some similar cosmology, as 
would be the cross and the crescent to those ignorant of history. The 
last named objects appeared in the class of emblems when used in desig- 
nating the conflicting powers of Christendom and Islamism. Emblems 
do not necessarily require any analogy between the objects representing, 
and the objects or qualities represented, but may arise from pure accident. 
After a scurrilous jest the beggar’s wallet became the emblem of the con- 
federated nobles, the Gueux of the Netherlands; and a sling, in the early 
minority of Louis XIV, was adopted from the refrain of a song by the 
Frondeur opponents of Mazarin. The portraiture of a fish, used, espe- 
cially by the early Christians, for the name and title of Jesus Christ was 
still more accidental, being, in the Greek word 7705s, an acrostic composed 
of the initials of the several Greek words signifying that name and title. 
This origin being unknown to persons whose religious enthusiasm was 
as usual in direct proportion to their ignorance, they expended much 
rhetoric to prove that there was some true symbolic relation between an 
actual fish and the Saviour of men. Apart from this misapplication, the 
tish undoubtedly became an emblem of Christ and of Christianity, ap- 
pearing frequently on the Roman catacombs and at one time it was used 
hermeneutically. 
The several tribal signs for the Sioux, Arapahos, Cheyennes, &e., are . 
their emblems precisely as the star-spangled flag is that of the United 
States, but there is nothing symbolic in any of them. So the signs for 
individual chiefs, when not merely translations of their names, are em- 
blematic of their family totems or personal distinctions, and are no more 
symbols than are the distinctive shoulder-straps of army officers. The 
cruz ansata and the circle formed by a snake biting its tail are symbols, 
but consensus as well as invention was necessary for their establishment, 
and the Indians have produced nothing so esoteric, nothing which they 
intended for hermeneutic as distinct from descriptive or mnemonic pur- 
