HERALDRY IN ENGLAXD AXD AMERICA, 



As you cannot speak or think of American history without thinking 

 of the history of all the ancestral nations hack of our brief national 



were the fanciful devices Homer describes on the shields of Hector 

 and Achilles, of any generic connection with the heraldry of London 

 or New York. The totems of the Six Nations that were once masters 

 in the valleys of the Hudson and the Mohawk wore emblems, but they 

 were not armorial distinctions. All of these are characteristic of times 

 of ignorance, of times when unlettered men needed a picture to iden- 



the bottom of a birchbark letter written in the picture language of the 

 Indian would understand the writer to be a chief of the nation that 

 used that animal as its totem. This use of the symbol or picture of 



or to authenticate the message of a private individual, was as common 

 in the world's history during the past 4,000 years, as it is to-day. 

 The seals of the kings of Assyria and Egypt are no uncommon sight 

 in the great museums of the world. But all this is not the heraldry 

 of the Plantagenets, nor of the Herald*- . o]l, u v, of Loudon and New 

 York. 



Planche, in his introduction to his work on this subject, says 

 "Heraldry has been contemptuously termed the ' science of fools with 

 long memories.'" But this may be set down as the malicious utter- 

 ance of some evil disposed person who searched but failed to find his 

 name in Burke's General Armory. 



