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At this a great cry for mercy went up, and the chief and all of them fell on their knees, calling out that they would submit to any conditions of peace he wished. Then the Doctor called for one of their scribes that is, a man who did picture-writing. And on the stone walls of the palace of Bag-jagderag he bade him write down the terms of the peace as he dictated it.
Watch again a gang of natives trying to get a log of timber down into the river from the bank, and you will see the same sort of thing no idea of a lever, or any thing of that sort and remember that, unless under white direction, the African has never made an even fourteenth-rate piece of cloth or pottery, or a machine, tool, picture, sculpture, and that he has never even risen to the level of picture-writing.
Heraldry properly so called was, of course, a wholly limited and aristocratic thing, but the remark needs a kind of qualification not commonly realized. In a sense there was a plebeian heraldry, since every shop was, like every castle, distinguished not by a name, but a sign. The whole system dates from a time when picture-writing still really ruled the world.
I am aware of his ingenious devices for transmitting messages, such as the cowrie shells, strung diversely on strings, in use among the Yoruba, but even these do not equal the picture-writing of the South American Indians, nor the picture the Red Indian does on a raw elk hide; they are far and away inferior to the graphic sporting sketches left us of mammoth hunts by the prehistoric cave men.
This was the celebrated picture-writing, and the governor said that this man was drawing all these things for Montezuma, as he would get a much better idea of their appearance thus.
The most poetical reputation of the North American Indian floats in a canoe made of it; his picture-writing was inscribed on it. It is the paper that nature furnishes for lovers in the wilderness, who are enabled to convey a delicate sentiment by its use, which is expressed neither in their ideas nor chirography.
The totem, or clan, which bore his name was looked up to with peculiar respect." Not only was Michabo the ruler and guardian of these numerous tribes, he was the founder of their religious rites, the inventor of picture-writing, the ruler of the weather, the creator and preserver of earth and heaven.
It seems sufficiently frantic that such a thing should have been said by one European of another, or even of a Red Indian, if Red Indians had occupied anything like the place of the Irish then and since; if there were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief Justice and a Red Indian Commander-in-Chief, if the Red Indian Party in Congress, containing first-rate orators and fashionable novelists, could have turned Presidents in and out; if half the best troops of the country were trained with the tomahawk and half the best journalism of the capital written in picture-writing, if later, by general consent, the Chief known as Pine in the Twilight, was the best living poet, or the Chief Thin Red Fox, the ablest living dramatist.
The interpretation of the picture-writing is this: 'Be baptized as this saved heathen, or be hanged as this damned heathen. Doubtless some of the people preferred a third alternative, and rather than be baptized or hanged they chose to be imprisoned within these cañon-walls."
Gallatin to which he has the effrontery to refer as an authority for his ridiculous assertion, that the "so-called picture-writing" of the Aztecs was a Spanish invention. As Mr. Gallatin's essay is within the reach of any of our readers who may be inclined to consult it, we shall content ourselves with a single remark on the subject. There is one remark in Mr. Gallatin's work on which Mr.