618 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
The moon, according to Lenormant, was always an older divinity than the sun. 
The boar is often an emblem of the sun in its strength. 
The dise (litu) was the weapon employed by Marduk, the warrior god, as men- 
tioned by Lenormant. 
The two pillars of Hermes are the proper emblem of the ancient Set or Thoth, the 
planet Mercury. 
The trisul belongs properly to the Asherah, god or goddess of fertility—the planet 
Venus. 
The Cidaris occurs in the Bavian sculptures in connection with a similar emblem. 
In the Chaldean system, Jupiter and Venus occur together as the youngest of the 
planets. 
It should also be noted that the position of the arms and the long robe covering 
the feet resemble the attitudes and dress of the MAlawiyeh dervishes in their sacred 
dance, symbolic of the seven planets revolving (according to the Ptolemaic system) 
round the earth. 
Didron (e) thus remarks upon the emblems in the Roman catacombs: 
The large fish marks the fisher who catches it or the manufacturer who extracts 
the oil from it. The trident indicates the sailor, as the pick the digger. The trade 
of digger in the catacombs was quite elevated; the primitive monuments thus 
represent these men who are of the lower class among us, and who in the beginning 
of the Christian era, when they dug the graves of saints and martyrs, were interred 
side by side with the rich and even beside saints, and were represented holding a 
pickaxe in one hand and a lamp in the other; the lamp lighted them in their sub- 
terranean labors. The hatchet indicates a carpenter, and the capital a sculptor or 
an architect. As to the dove, it probably designates the duties of the mother of a 
family who nourishes the domestic birdlings as would appear to be indicated by a 
mortuary design in Bosis. It is possible, moreover, that it originated from a sym- 
bolic idea, but this idea would be borrowed from profane rather than religious 
sentiments, and I would more willingly see in it the memorial of the good qualities 
of the dead, man or woman, the fidelity of the wife, or of the dove, which returning 
to the ark after the deluge announced that the waters had retired and the land had 
again appeared; from this we can not conclude that the fish filled a réle analogous 
to it, nor above all that it is the symbol of Christ; the dove is in the Old Testament, 
the fish neither in the old nor in the new. 
Edkins (b) says respecting the Chinese: 
It is easy to trace the process of symbol-making in the words used for the crene- 
lated top of city walls, which are ya and c’hi, both meaning ‘‘ teeth ” and both being 
pictures of the object, and further, when the former is found also to be used for 
“tree buds” and ‘‘to bud.” Such instances of word creation show how considerable 
has been the prevalence of analogy and the association of ideas. The picture writing 
of the Chinese is to a large extent a continuation of the process of forming analogies 
to which the human mind had already become aceustomed in the earlier stages of 
the history of language. 
D’Alviella (>) furnishes this poetical and truthful suggestion: 
It is not surprising that the Hindoos and Egyptians should both have adopted as 
the symbol of the sun the lotus flower, which opens its petals to the dawn and 
infolds them on the approach of night, and which seems to be born of itself on the 
surface of the still waters. 
SECTION 3. 
SIGNIFICANCE OF COLORS. 
The use of color to be considered in studies of pictography is proba- 
bly to be traced to the practice of painting on the surface of the human 
body. This use is very ancient. The Ethiopians in the army of Xerxes 
