Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/472

450 the challenge, and the staff still broken in Germany over the head of the condemned criminal, are instances of the same general style of instrumentality for expressing meaning. Objects, too, are used in a more arbitrary and conventional way, as reminders, helps to the recollection of that which is communicated orally. So the North American Indian on solemn occasions, had his strips of wampum, corresponding to the heads of the discourse he had prepared; and handed them over, one after another, as each announcement was made or each argument finished, to the person addressed. We should hardly need to take any notice of a method of intimation so rude and indefinite as this, but for the development which we know it to have attained, as a practical means of communication and record, in the usage of one or two nations. It received its greatest elaboration in the system of the quippos, or knotted cords, employed in Peru at the time of its discovery and conquest. With these cords the state messengers were provided, and by their numbers, their colours, their groupings, their style of knotting, they were made conventionally significant of each one's message, even to partial independence of his own oral explanation. The accounts, and, to a certain extent, the annals also, of the empire of the Incas are claimed to have been intelligibly kept by means of the quippos. The Peruvians doubtless made out of this coarse instrumentality all that it was capable of becoming; but the essentially low grade of their capacity and culture is indicated by the fact that they had risen to the invention of nothing better. The Chinese, too, curiously enough, have preserved the tradition that their earliest ancestors wrote by means of knotted cords, until the mythical emperor Fo-hi devised the beginnings of the better system of which we shall have presently to speak.

A higher degree of ingenuity, and a greatly superior capacity of progression and development, are to be seen in the contrivance of a picture-writing. This, in its simplest form, is found all over the world, among peoples of a certain degree of civilization. Let us look at an example furnished by the aborigines of our own country.