Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/97

Rh ability, generally known as the "Shawnee Prophet," having, as was said, learnt the doctrines of Christianity from a missionary, taught them to his tribe, pretending to have received a super- natural mission. He composed a prayer, which he wrote down on a flat stick, "in characters somewhat resembling Chinese letters." When Catlin visited the tribe, every man, woman, and child used to repeat this prayer morning and evening, placing the fore-finger under the first character, repeating a sentence or two, and so going on to the next, till the prayer, which took some ten minutes to repeat, was finished. I do not know whether any of these curious prayer-sticks are now to be seen, but they were probably made on the same principle as the suggestive pictures used for the native Indian songs.

Picture-writing is found among savage races in all quarters of the globe, and, so far as we can judge, its principle is the same everywhere. The pictures on the Lapland magic drums, of which we have interpretations, serve much the same purpose as the American writing. Savage paintings, or scratchings, or carvings on rocks, have a family likeness, whether we find them in North or South America, in Siberia or Australia. The interpretation of rock-pictures, which mostly consist of few figures, is in general a hopeless task, unless a key is to be had. Many are, no doubt, mere pictorial utterances, drawings of animals and things without any historical sense; some are names, as the totems carved by those who sprang upon the dangerous leaping-rock at the Red Pipestone Quarry. Dupaix noticed in Mexico a sculptured eagle, apparently on the boundary of Quauhnahuac, "the place near the eagle," now called Cuernavaca, and the fact suggests that rock-sculptures may often be, like this, symbolic boundary marks. But there is seldom a key to be had to the reading of rock-sculptures, which the natives generally say were done by the people long ago. I have seen them in Mexico on cliffs where one can hardly imagine how the savage sculptors can have climbed. When Humboldt asked the Indians of the