562 MEDICINE-MEN OF THE APACHE. 
“Mr. Astle informs us that the first Chinese letters were knots on 
cords.” ! 
Speaking of the ancient Japanese, the Chinese chronicles relate: 
“They have no writing, but merely cut certain marks upon wood and 
make knots in cord.”? In the very earliest myths of the Chinese we 
read of “knotted cords, which they used instead of characters, and to 
instruct their children.”* Malte-Brun calls attention to the fact that 
“the hieroglyphies and little cords in use amongst the ancient Chinese 
recal in a striking manner the figured writing of the Mexicans and 
the Quipos of Peru.”* “ Kach combination [of the quipu] had, how- 
ever, a fixed ideographic value in a certain branch of knowledge, and 
thus the quipu differed essentially from the Catholic rosary, the Jewish 
phylactery, or the knotted strings of the natives of North America and 
Siberia, to all of which it has at times been compared.”° 
EK. B. Tylor differs in opinion from Brinton. According to Tylor, 
“the quipu is a near relation of the rosary and the wampum-string.”® 
The use of knotted cords by natives of the Caroline Islands, as a 
means of preserving a record of time, is noted by Kotzebue in several 
places. For instance: “ Kadu kept his journal by moons, for which he 
made a knot in a string.”7 
During the years of my service with the late Maj. Gen. Crook in the 
Southwest, I was surprised to discover that the Apache scouts kept 
records of the time of their absence on campaign. There were several 
methods in vogue, the best being that of colored beads, which were 
strung on a string, six white ones to represent the days of the week 
and one black or other color to stand for Sundays. This method gave 
rise to some confusion, because the Indians had been told that there 
were four weeks, or Sundays (‘‘ Domingos”), in each ‘“ Luna,” or moon, 
and yet they soon found that their own method of determining time by 
the appearance of the crescent moon was much the more satisfactory. 
Among the Zuni I have seen little tally sticks with the marks for the 
days and months incised on the narrow edges, and among the Apache 
another method of indicating the flight of time by marking on a piece 
of paper along a horizontal line a number of circles or of straight lines 
across the horizontal datum line to represent the full days which had 
passed, a heavy straight line for each Sunday, and a small crescent for 
the beginning of each month. 
Farther to the south, in the Mexican state of Sonora, I was shown, 
some twenty years ago, a piece of buckskin, upon which certain Opata 
or Yaqui Indians—I forget exactly which tribe, but it matters very 
! Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol. 2, p. 218. 
?Vining, An Inglorious Columbus, p. 635. 
’Du Halde, History of China, London, 1736, vol. 1, p. 270. 
4Univ. Geog., vol. 3, book 75, p. 144, Phila., 1832. 
’Brinton, Myths of the New World, N. Y., 1868, p. 15. 
®Early History of Mankind, London, 1870, p. 156. 
7 Voyages, vol. 3. p. 102. 
‘ 
