PICTUEE-WEITTNG AND WORD-WRITING. 89- 



ago. I have seen them in Mexico on cliffs where one can 

 hardly imagine how the savage sculptors can have climbed. 

 When Humboldt asked the Indians of the Oronoko who it 

 was that sculptured the figures of animals and symboHc signs 

 high up on the face of the crags along the river, they answered 

 with a smile, as relating a fact of which only a stranger, a 

 white man, could possibly be ignorant, " that at the time of the 

 great 'Waters their fathers went up to that height in their canoes."^ 



As the gesture-language is substantially the same among 

 savage tribes al] over the world, and also among children who 

 cannot speak, so the picture-writings of savages are not only 

 similar to one another, but are like what children make un- 

 taught even in civilized countries. Like the universal language 

 of gestures, the art of picture-writing tends to prove that the 

 mind of the uncultured man works in much the same way at 

 all times and everywhere. As an example of the way in which 

 it is possible for an observer who has never realized this fact 

 to be led astray by such a general resemblance, the celebrated 

 " Livre des Sauvages " may be adduced. 



This book of pictures had been lying for many years in a 

 Paris library, before the Abbe Domenech unearthed it and 

 published it in facsimile, as a native American document of 

 high ethnological value. It contains a number of rude drawings 

 done in black lead and red chalk, in great part enormously in- 

 decent, though perhaps not so much with the grossness of the 

 savage as of the Em'opean blackguard. Many of the drawings 

 represent Scripture scenes, and ceremonies of the Roman Ca- 

 tholic church, often accompanied by explanatory German words 

 in the cursive hand, one or two of which, as the name 

 " Maria " written close to a rude figure of the Virgin Mary, 

 the Abbe succeeded in reading, though most of them were a 

 deep mystery to him. There are an evident Adam and Eve in 

 the garden, with " betruger " (deceiver) written against them ; 

 Adam and Eve sent out of Paradise, with the description 

 " gebant " (banished) ; a priest offering mass ; figures with the 

 well-known rings of bread in their hands, explained as " fass- 

 dag" (fast-day), and so on. There is no evidence of any con- 



' Hiimboldt and Bonpland, vol. ii. p. 239. 



