INSCRIPTIONS AND CODICES. The early travelers and settlers in many parts of America found designs inscribed or painted on trees and rocks; and throughout the more mountainous portions of the Western Hemisphere, petroglyphs (usually formed by battering the rock-face with a harder stone, but sometimes sharply incised) are numer ous and striking. These rude inscriptions grade into the sculptures and stucco moldings of Mexico and Peru, as well as into the desirns molded and painted on the fictile ware; at the same time they are related to the inscriptions of the maguey codices which were found in great numbers by the Conquistadores, but were sacri ficed under hasty ecclesiastic impulse before their value was understood—all save the few speci mens looted by subalterns or privates, and sent surreptitiously to Europe as souvenirs of per sonal success. The various aboriginal records are not only alike in general character, but tell a consistent story of intellectual advancement on the part of the earliest Americans; and their testimony is corroborated by modern observation of the autographic records of tribesmen in many districts. On putting together the various
records, it appears that none of the pre-Colum bian aborigines had grasped the idea of arbitrary characters, but were satisfied with crude symbols understood only by themselves, or conventions understood by special classes only (like the fig mines on the wampum treaty belts, each recall ing a clause or item in the vaguely remembered contract) ; and that even the most elaborate in scriptions were little inure than sacred calendars designed to control ceremonial and understood only by the priests. Accordingly, the inscriptions attest a germ of writing, yet prove that the germ remained largely inchoate up to the coining of Columbus, and the introduction of incomparably higher intellectual standards: True, the North American Indian Sequoyali invented a syllabary which aided his kind in their strife for intellectual advancement and which might have developed a written language; hut there is some question as to whether his in vention was not stimulated by European sugges tion.