CO} 1s AIP Nd OY ICAL 5 
IDBOGRAPHY. 
The imagination is stimulated and developed by the sense of sight 
more than by any other sense, perhaps more than by all of the other 
senses combined. The American Indians, and probably all savages, 
are remarkable for acute and critical vision, and also for their retentive 
memory of what they have once seen. When significance is once 
attached to an object seen, it will always be recalled, though often with 
false deductions. Therefore, like deaf-mutes, who depend mainly on 
sight, the American Indians have developed great facility in com- 
municating by signs, and also in expressing their ideas in pictures 
which are ideographic though seldom artistic. This tendency has 
likewise affected their spoken languages. Their terms express with 
wonderful particularity the characters and relations of visible objects, 
and their speeches, which are in a high degree metaphoric, become so 
by the figurative presentation in words of such objects accompanied 
generally by imitative signs for them, and often by their bodily exhi- 
bition. 
The statement once made that the aboriginal languages of North 
America are not capable of expressing abstract ideas is incorrect, 
but the tendency to use tangible and visible forms for such ideas is 
apparent. This practice was most marked in reference to religious 
subjects, which were often presented under the veil of symbols, as has 
been the common expedient of most peoples who have emerged from 
the very lowest known stages of human culture, but have not attained 
the highest. 
Many instances appear in this work in which pictures expressive 
of an idea present more than mere portraitures of objects, which latter 
method has been styled imitative or iconographic writing. 
It is, however, impossible to classify with scientific precision the 
pictured ideograms collected, for the reason that many of them occupy 
intermediate points in any scheme that would be succinct enough to 
be practically useful. In the arrangement of the present chapter the 
division is made into: Ist. Abstract ideas expressed pictorially. 2d. 
Signs, symbols, andemblems. 3d. Significance of colors. 4th. Gesture 
and posture signs depicted. When any of the graphic representations 
of ideas have become successful, i. e., commonly adopted, it soon becomes 
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