54 THE TEIBUTE ROLL OF HIONTEZUMA. 



some signs or marks which designated to what clan he belonged, or of what deeds he 

 was proud. If his family was that of the bear, he would draw the outline of a bear ; 

 if he boasted of his hunting exploits, he would depict the outlines of a man spearing 

 an animal. 



Just such devices do we find on fragments of bone and stone dating from the 

 Magdalenian epoch in France. They are the beginnings of recorded language, the 

 primitive examples of writing. In such instances of picture writing, the outline of 

 the bear recalled the concept, bear, and this is the utmost that any form of writing 

 can do. 



Picture writing was familiar to almost all American tribes. It is the simplest 

 and first step to all stages of recorded thought ; but it is cumbrous, and inapplicable 

 to many ideas. We cannot directly depict what is abstract, or a general term, or a ' 

 complex conception. This deficiency led to the employment of symbolic characters. 

 In these, a part is taken for the whole of a picture, as a foot of a rabbit for the 

 rabbit itself; or the figure of the sun, the life-giver, for the abstract idea of life — 

 both which symbols occur in the native Algoukin writing. In time, the symbol be- 

 came conventionalized in form, so that the connection which originally existed 

 between it and a concrete conception was lost from sight and memory. The 

 figure of forgotten origin represented an idea, and this was all that was known about 

 it. Thus arose ideographic writing, such as we find in singular development among 

 the Chinese. 



Still, it will be observed, there is no relation of any of these signs to the sound 

 of the language. All of them — pictorial, symb olic and ideographic — bear no more 

 relation to the spoken word than do the Arabic numerals to ns. An ideographic text, 

 like an algebraic formula, can be read by all who have once been taught the mean- 

 ing of its elements. It is a universal language. This immense advantage is more than 

 counterbalanced by the enormity of the task of committing to memory the necessary 

 number of ideograms requisite for the purposes of life. It is said that in China at least 

 five thousand characters are needed to conduct a business of ordinary extent ; and that 

 a man of learning should be able to recognize twenty to thirty thousand. Few men 

 in life require a knowledge of more than three languages ; while the great majority 

 have no use for more than one. Hence a method which represents all the concepts 

 in a language by the combination of thirty or forty characters is incalculably more 

 time-saving, and therefore better for the vastly greater number, than one which 

 demands thousands of characters. 



This obvious advantage made itself felt early in the history of writing. The 

 most ancient Pyramid texts of Egypt, the oldest Cuneiform of Syria, indicate the 



