Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/304

274 primitive times, the working of wood did no less. The potter's art originated early, and the forms of primitive pottery are an ever-pleasing surprise to the archaeologist and the technographer. The same is true of the textile industry. In producing implements of war and the chase invention made important advances in primitive times, and material is not lacking to show how facilities for travel and transportation, both by land and sea, arose. Coming to the end of the volume, we are impelled to query why the author made his index so scanty, and why he divided it in the inconvenient German fashion.

The other of the two hooks referred to above is concerned with the art of writing. The important aid which this art gives to man's progress by preserving the experience of each generation to guide all that follow makes it well worthy of separate treatment. The art of transmitting intelligence proceeds from objects serving as reminders through picture writing to phonetic writing with an alphabet. The author has presented this course of development especially as it is shown among the native races of North America, from the Innuit in the north to the Mayas and ancient Mexicans in the south, among whom all stages are represented. Illustrations are frequently drawn also from the Egyptian and other Oriental peoples. It is easy to see how objects can be represented by pictures, and savage races have shown themselves very clever in representing action by the same means. Thus in many of the Ojibwa records going, or running, is represented by drawing either the sole of the foot or the lower j)art of the legs. In the Mexican codices a distinction between running and walking is denoted by placing the legs in the correct position in each case. The sign for eating or food among several peoples consists of a human figure with the hand placed to the mouth. Lines proceeding from the mouth of either a human or animal figure denote the use of the voice. Adding the figure of the heart within the outline of the human body makes the voice lines mean singing. Similarly wavy lines from the ears denote hearing. To distinguish an object used as a proper name, a human figure or the head alone is placed below it with a line from the mouth to the name object. Such signs gradually become conventionalized and reduced to simpler forms. When the name or sound suggested by one object comes to be joined with another such sound to denote a word having only a phonetic relation to the names of these two objects, then the ideograms become phonograms. Further progress in this direction converts the phonograms into alphabetic characters. At the discovery of America the writing of the Mexicans and Mayas was rapidly approaching the syllabic stage. The only phonetic alphabet actually devised by aboriginal Americans is that of the Cherokee, Sequoya, but this uses the forms of the Roman letters variously modified, and hence is not an independent creation. Dr. Hoffman's volume contains four plates and over a hundred smaller figures, and is adequately indexed.

The world is beginning to realize that "Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war," and in consequence its appetite for butchery seems to be abating. A set of books called the Century Science Series, that has been