PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
By GARRICK MALLERY. 
INTRODUCTION. 
An essay entitled *‘ Pictographs of the North American Indians: A 
Preliminary Paper,” appeared in the Fourth Annual Report of the 
Bureau of Ethnology. The present work is not a second edition of 
that essay, but is a continuation and elaboration of the same subject. 
Of the eighty-three plates in that paper not one is here reproduced, 
although three are presented with amendments; thus fifty-one of the 
fifty-four plates in this volume are new. Many of the text figures, 
however, are used again, as being necessary to the symmetry of the 
present work, but they are now arranged and correlated so as to be 
much more useful than when unmethodically disposed as before, and 
the number of text figures now given is twelve hundred and ninety- 
five as against two hundred and nine, the total number in the former 
paper. The text itself has been rewritten and much enlarged. The 
publication of the “ Preliminary Paper” has been of great value in the 
preparation of the present work, as it stimulated investigation and 
report on the subject to such an extent that it is now impossible 
to publish within reasonable limits of space all the material on hand. 
Indeed, after the present work had been entirely written and sent to 
the Public Printer, new information came to hand which ought to be 
published, but can not now be inserted. 
Tt is also possible to give more attention than before to the picture- 
writing of the aboriginal inhabitants of America beyond the limits of 
the United States. While the requirements of the acts of Congress 
establishing the Bureau of Ethnology have been observed by directing 
main attention to the Indians of North America, there is sufficient 
notice of Central and South America to justify the present title, in 
which also the simpler term “picture-writing” is used instead of “ picto- 
graphs.” 
Picture-writing is a mode of expressing thoughts or noting facts by 
marks which at first were confined to the portrayal of natural or arti- 
ficial objects. It is one distinctive form of thought-writing without 
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