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LANGUAGE, 
were unintelligible ; it was impossible by the quipus to ex- 
press a single idea or thing by name, both may be regarded 
as being much the same as our tallies, which until very 
lately were used even in Britain, and perhaps the ancient 
Ogham stones were little more ; all these may be considered 
as the first rude efforts of the human mind to perpetuate 
thought by visible symbols ; they are a starting point of 
civilization, until language is expressed by fixed signs or 
letters there can be no true advancement, because there is 
no possibility of handing down the knowledge, experience, 
and ideas of one generation to another ; tradition can only 
preserve a modicum of what passes ; it is at most a bare re- 
cord of the more striking events which the memory can 
retain, a written language perpetuates thought, makes the 
human mind to live for ever, and to increase with the race, 
in a measure, it annihilates even death itself. 
The rude picture writing of the Aztec may be considered 
as the next step from the wampum and quipus to a written 
language ; by the two former, numbers were preserved, by 
the latter, objects ; next came the hieroglyphics of Yucatan, 
and probably letters ; they represented a number of objects, 
and by their combination enabled those who used them 
partially to record ideas, those hieroglyphics becoming fixed 
symbols were the first approach to an alphabet ; they 
have in many cases been converted, in process of time, 
into letters ; it has been so with the Chinese ; but though 
this has so far modified the hieroglyphic form, still each 
only stands for as much as the former, and is not capable 
of that combination which letters are, for the Chinese 
being a monosyllabic language, each word by means of 
prefixes and affixes may thus be rendered capable of ex- 
pressing many things directly or indirectly bearing reference 
to the parent syllable ; still all these changes are expressed 
by one figure variously altered, which at last renders it 
a complicated character, and as each simple idea was 
expressed by one symbol, it naturally followed that those 
would become more and more numerous as civilization ad- 
vanced ; so that though at first there were but two hundred 
