Knowledge of the priscan homes and of the migrations of tribes necessary to ascertain their former habitat in connection with the probable age of rock-etchings or paintings is manifestly desirable.
It is obvious that before attempting the interpretation of pictographs, concerning which no direct information is to be obtained, there should be a full collection of known characters, in order that through them the unknown may be learned. When any considerable number of objects in a pictograph are actually known, the remainder may be ascertained by the context, the relation, and the position of the several designs, and sometimes by the recognized principles of the art.
The Bureau of Ethnology has been engaged, therefore, for a considerable time in collating a large number of characters in a card-catalogue arranged primarily by similarity in forms, and in attaching to each character any significance ascertained or suggested. As before explained, the interpretation upon which reliance is mainly based is that which has been made known by direct information from Indians who themselves were actually makers of pictographs at the time of giving the interpretation. Apart from the comparisons obtained by this collation, the only mode of ascertaining the meaning of the characters, in other words, the only key yet discovered, is in the study of the gesture-sign included in many of them. The writer several years ago suggested that among people where a system of ideographic gesture-signs prevailed, it would be expected that their form would appear in any mode of artistic representation made by the same people with the object of conveying ideas or recording facts. When a gesture-sign had been established and it became necessary or desirable to draw a character or design to convey the same ideas, nothing could be more natural than to use the graphic form or delineation which was known and used in the gesture-sign. It was but one more step, and an easy one, to fasten upon bark, skins, or rocks the evanescent air pictures of the signs.
The industrious research of Dr. D. G. Brinton, whose recent work, The Lenâpé and their Legends, before mentioned, is received as this paper passes through the press, has discovered passages in Rafinesque’s generally neglected and perhaps unduly discredited volumes, by which that eccentric but acute writer seems to have announced the general proposition that the graphic signs of the Indians correspond to their manual signs. He also asserted that he had collected a large number of them, though the statement is not clear, for if all Indian pictographs are, in a very general sense, “based upon their language of signs,” all of those pictographs might be included in his alleged collection, without an ascertained specific relation between any pictograph and any sign. It is probable, however, that Rafinesque actually had at least valuable notes on the subject, the loss of which is greatly to be regretted.