MALLERY.] EMBLEMS AND SYMBOLS. 611 
lish impressions or engravings of ancient Roman money, on which are frequently 
given very interesting representations of customs and symbolical acts. On Grecian 
coins we find, to use heraldic language, that the owl is the crest of Athens, a wolf’s 
head that of Argos, and a tortoise the badge of the Peloponnesus. The whole his- 
tory of Louis XIV and that of his great adversary, William III, is represented in 
volumes containing the medals that were struck to commemorate the leading events 
of their reigns, and, though outrageously untrue to nature and reality by the 
adoption of Roman costumes and classic symbols, they serve as records of remarka- 
ble occurrences. 
Heraldry throughout employs the language of emblems; it is the picture-history 
of families, of tribes, and of nations, of princes and emperors. Many a legend and 
many a strange fancy may be mixed up with it, and demand almost the credulity 
of simplest childhood in order to obtain our credence; yet in the literature of chiy- 
alry and honors there are enshrined abundant records of the glory that belonged 
to mighty names. 
The custom of taking a device or badge, if not a motto, is traced to the earliest 
times of history. It is a point not to be doubted that the ancients used to bear 
crests and ornaments in the helmets and on the shields; for we see this clearly in 
Virgil, when he made the catalogue of thé nations which came in favor of Turnus 
against the Trojans, in the eighth book of the Hneid; Amphiaraus then (as Pindar 
says), at the war of Thebes, bore a dragon on his shield. Similarly Statius writes 
of Capaneus and of Polinices that the one bore the Hydra and the other the Sphynx. 
Emblems do not necessarily require any analogy between the objects 
representing and the objects or qualities represented, but may arise 
from pure accident. They may bear any meaning that men may choose 
to attach to them, so their value still more than that of symbols 
depends upon extrinsic facts and not intrinsic features. After a scur- 
rilous jest the beggar’s wallet became the emblem of the confederated 
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 several tribal designations for Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, 
ete., are their emblems, precisely as the star-spangled flag is that of 
the United States, but there is no intrinsic symbolism in them. So 
the designs for individuals, when not merely translations of their 
names, are emblematic of their family totems or personal distinctions, 
and are no more symbols than are the distinctive shoulder-straps of an 
army officer. 
The point urged is that while many signs can be used as emblems 
and both can be converted by convention into symbols or be explained 
as such by perverted ingenuity, it is futile to seek for that form of 
psychological exuberance in the stage of development attained by the 
greater part of the American tribes. All predetermination to interpret 
their pictographs on the principles of symbolism as understood or pre- 
tended to be understood by its admirers, and as are sometimes properly. 
applied not only to Egyptian hieroglyphics, but to Mexican, Maya, and 
some other southern pictographs, results in mooning mysticism. 
The following examples are presented as being either symbols or 
emblems, according to the definition of those terms, and therefore 
