Some curious pictures done by North American Indians have been found on rocks and stones, and on the stems of pine-trees in America, which furnish excellent examples of early picturing. Mr. Tylor, in his _Early History of Mankind_, gives engravings of several of these shadowy records of long-past events. One of these, which was found on the smoothed surface of a pine-tree, consists merely of a rude outline of two canoes, one surmounted by a bear with a peculiar tail and the other by a fish, and beyond these a quantity of shapes meant for a particular kind of fish. The entire picture records the successes of two chieftains named Copper-tail Bear and Cat-fish, in a fishing excursion. Another picture found on the surface of a rock near Lake Superior is more elaborate, and interests us by showing a new element in picturing, through which it was destined to grow into the condition of picture-writing. This more elaborate picture shows an arch with three suns in it--a tortoise, a man about to mount a horse, and several canoes, one surmounted by the image of a bird. All this tells that the chief called King-fisher made an expedition of three days across a lake, and arriving safely on land, mounted his horse. The new element introduced into this picture is symbolism, the same that transformed the homely system of tallies into the Scythian’s graceful living message to Darius. It shows the excess of thought over the power of expression, which will soon necessitate a new form. The tortoise is used as a symbol of dry land. The arch is, of course, the sky, and the three suns in it mean three days. The artist who devised these ways of expressing his thought was on the verge of picture-writing, which is the next stage in the upward progress of the art of recording events, and the stage at which some nations have terminated their efforts.
Picture-writing differs from picturing in that it aims at conveying to the mind, not a representation of an event, but a narrative of the event in words, each word being represented by a picture. The distinction is of immense importance. The step from the former to the latter is one of the greatest which mankind has ever made in the course of its progress in civilization. When the step had been made the road toward the acquisition of a regular alphabet lay _comparatively_ open. It was still beset with difficulties, but none so great as the difficulty of making this particular step. Let us try and fully understand this. We will take a sentence and see how it might be conveyed by the two methods. _A man slew a lion with a bow and arrows while the sun went down._ Picturing would show the man with a drawn bow in his hand, the lion struck by the arrow, the sun on the horizon. Picture-writing would present a series of little pictures and symbols dealing separately with each word--a man, a symbol for ‘slew,’ say a hand smiting, a lion, a connecting symbol for ‘with,’ and so on. We see at once how much more elaborate and exact the second method is, and that it makes the telling of a continuous story possible. We also discover that these various stages of writing correspond to developments of language, and that as languages grow in capacity to express nobler thoughts, a greater stress will be put upon invention to render the more recondite words by pictures and symbols, till at last language will outgrow all possibility of being so rendered, and another method of showing words to the eye will have to be thought of--for all languages at least that attain their full development. That a great deal may be expressed by pictures and symbols, however, we learn from the picturing and picture-writing of past races that have come down to us, and from the present writing of the Chinese, who with their radical language have preserved the pictorial character that well accords with an early stage of language.