I

THE EVOLUTION OF EXPRESSED THOUGHT.

BY F. W. FITZPATRICK.

N writing to a friend, did you ever stop to think how wonderful it is that you can thus convey to your friend the duplication of your thoughts, the innermost workings of your mind? Probably you have not. Familiarity with wonderous things breeds a species of contempt for them. We accept writing and printing, travel by rapid train or in an automobile or aeroplane, the sending of wireless messages, all these things as mere matters of course, and marvel not. With writing it is much as with all the other inventions that have been carried to a high degree of perfection and simplicity. We are so far from the clumsy beginnings of the thing, we are so very familiar with it only in its perfected form, that few of us ever bother our minds as to how it came about or the steps through which it has progressed to its present perfected state. Had it not been for writing, "speaking signs", in some form or other and of however rude a character, what would we know today of what took place yesterday or a hundred or a thousand years ago? Yet less than a century ago it was still impossible to write the correct history of those signs, the forerunners, or the forebears, of our modern writing; but researchers into archeology, and learned philologists have delved into the antiquities of Egypt, of the Orient, of Mexico, and the older civilizations, and have been able to decipher the meanings of the signs and writings they found, and have done it so well that today we have positive information where even but a few years ago all was conjecture. The findings of these men make interesting reading.

In the earliest times, man sought to leave behind him or to communicate to his fellows his thought or a simple record of what he had done. To accomplish this he had recourse to the most elementary means, fit only to give the slightest idea of the fact he wished to state. He associated the idea with the physical object made or observed by him. Later on, as he grew wiser, he discovered a

mnemonical aid to his own remembrance of what he had done or to the perpetuation of that information to others in the shape of fashioning out of natural objects, boulders, tree limbs, etc., rude representations of this or that. Later still he began to draw rough outlines of animals or men, with dried clay, upon the smooth surface of rocks. Then he discovered several pigments, and filled in solidly with color between those outlines he had learned to draw.

The artist, Alexander beautifully illustrates this process of evolution of the art of writing, or, as he shows it, printing, in his masterly series of paintings in the lobby of the Library of Congress at Washington. In one panel he depicts a lot of primitive men building up a heap of stones by the seaside, a "cairn" to mark the stage in the journey of that tribe. In the next panel is shown an Arabian story-teller declaiming to his people "tradition". Following these panels is one wherein an Egyptian workman is cutting hieroglyphics over a portal to a temple; then follows an American Indian "picture-writing" or telling the story of his people's wars by depicting warriors, horses, and arrows in distemper color upon the crudely dressed skin of a deer. Next is a monk in his cloister cell, patiently toiling away at illuminating a manuscript, telling us the story of the Middle Ages; and then comes Guttenburg and his assistants at work about his printing press, the most useful invention of all times.

But, to get back to our great-grandfathers' fore-fathers. From drawing upon smooth surfaces, it was but a step to incising similar pictures with a sharp instrument upon trees, or even engraving them upon rocks. Some primitive tribes, however, had the draftsman's bump so little developed that they never got to the picture stage. but were content with certain rudimentary combinations of straight and oblique lines, that meant something to themselves, and that it has taken us an age and many sulphurous exclamations to decipher. They traced those lines upon skins and upon dried leaves, and did get far enough along to cut them into trees and rocks. Others used bits of grass-woven string, knotted here and there to mean certain things. The fellow who ties a knot in his handkerchief to remember something he has to do during the day, is but reverting to the expedients of his ancient tribal forebears.

Chinese tradition has it that this knotting of strings and also the cutting of little twigs to varying lengths originated in Hoango, and, as a matter of fact, the more or less barbarous tribes, the Miaos and others of southwestern China, still use those modes of

communication. In Peru, under the Incas, knotted strings of different lengths and colors were the mediums of a really high order of "speaking signs", in which much subtlety of expression was possible.

One of the sacred books of China, the Y-King, describes a lot of mysterious signs invented by their famed king, Fou-hi, that were nothing more than representations of knotted strings affixed to twigs that in turn were notched. These notched sticks, khi-mous, were used by the Tartar chiefs in transmitting their orders until the introduction of the ouigour alphabet of Syrian origin. When the Germanic peoples first became acquainted with the Latin letters, they called them buchstaben, associating them in their minds with the notched sticks of their ancestors. And the Scandinavians still have their bak-stafin, or divining-rods, undoubtedly traceable back to the same origin.

Our North American Indians intercommunicated, and recorded events, by means of as rudely drawn picture-signs as we were guilty of in our early childhood, before we graduated into the colored pencils and ground-glass stage of our existence. Yet they managed to convey much information by those self-same rough pictures, their history, their mythologies, their medicine prescriptions and a host of other matters. The farther south you trace these Indians the higher cultivation do you find, and the nearer approach to refinement of expression as well as of execution in their pictures. When Cortez first penetrated into Mexico in 1519, he found that the people had carried their picture language to such perfection that it was indeed an art. In this ideographic painting, they used the same tropes and figures of thought as we do in speech, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche. In that they resembled the Egyptians; could they have been of common origin? Both peoples used a part to represent a whole, or even an entire class. For instance, did they wish to convey the idea of retreat, they merely drew a lance or an arrow and a pair of human legs running from the lance. That was as clear to them and to our scientists today as if they had drawn two full bands of warriors, one fleeing from the other. Certainly it involved much less work, a sort of Pitman stenographic system, that gives us an arm brandising a sort of hatchet against another arm protected by a shield to show that such a man successfully withstood the attack of such another. This manner of abbreviation must not be confounded, however, with the Chinese hoei-i signs or combinations. The two

systems are radically different. With the Chinese it was merely a qualification, a sort of constant adjective formation. With them a bird and a human mouth pictured together meant to sing; an eye in water, tears; an ear between two flaps of a screen door, to listen, etc. With the more cultivated nations, this picture language soon grew into a veritable science, too involved and subtle for the ordinary mortal; it became the mode of communication between the official and the priestly classes, and its deciphering today involves the greatest research into, and most intimate familiarity with, their ways and ideas. Unless you know that they thought the vulture. bred from the female alone, how could you surmise that that bird was the Egyptian symbol of maternity? Or that the goose stood for filial devotion, if you had not learned that the Nile goose was supposed to care for the parent bird until the latter finally shuffled off into the green lotus fields of goose heaven?

This picture painting and engraving was not only done upon rocks and tree trunks, but was used architecturally to decorate the portals of the temples; in fact, whole fronts of buildings were so covered, and became lasting inscriptions; aye, complete histories of the times and the people. But these were immovable books, so to speak. A demand arose for something that could be carried away if the people were attacked, or that could be moved if they found a more fertile country; some durable record, but one that could be transported more easily than could a temple or a tree. So they took to drawing their figures upon dried skins, broad palm leaves, and rudely woven stuffs. Some enthusiasts, notably the Polynesians, used their own skin for that purpose. That, possibly, was the beginning of tattooing. Upon those stalwart islanders you could read the story of their lives, their feats of valor, their exploits, even the records of their obligations and debts. We still brand our cattle with certain signs that set them apart as ours, our sailormen still tattoo certain signs of their trade upon their chests and arms, and it was not so many centuries ago that our fathers branded criminals with a letter that stood for the crime of which they were found guilty. Some one has said that it takes a thousand generations to completely eradicate all trace of a custom!

Soon these peoples, as conditions changed and civilization progressed, wrote or made signs and figures more and more frequently, until by dint of freedom in drawing, practice, and much abbreviation, they reduced their different series of figures to merest

signs, a system almost tachygraphic, and to us, at this date, bearing little resemblance to the forms they are supposed to represent. They grow more and more cursive. Witness the hieratic writing upon some of the older papyri. This again was improved upon, and all semblance to the old forms is lost in the writings we find that were executed under the later Pharaohs and Ptolemies, demotic writing.

In China these picture-signs were even more conventionalized than among the Egyptians or Mexicans. They became mere up and down strokes, with a few side ones thrown in to keep peace in the family. The writing ceased to be figurative to become purely semiographic or formations representing clusters of ideas or ideograms. And thence grew the cuneiform writing, each sign bearing no longer any semblance to a picture, but having a defined value mnemonically, and many of them even phonetically.

We are passing from one system to another,-half an hour to cover all of them! Do you want an idea of the time taken for the evolution of picture writing? From the time we know some peoples were using it-there is every reason to suppose, too, that others used it centuries before that—to the period we have just glanced at, when it began to be cumbersome and grew into cuneiform and other conventional lines, over fifteen centuries had elapsed.

Our scholars have deciphered nearly all of these forms, excepting only the Hittite inscriptions and the katoun signs upon some of the Yucatan monuments that still remain closed books to them and, needless to add, spurs to redoubled efforts toward getting at their true meaning.

It is an interesting but too long a task to trace this transition, where a sign ceases to represent a real object and simply recalls to mind the sound of the word that has been selected as its name, all through the inscriptions and papyri and clay tablets of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Chinese, the Babylonians, and the Medes.

The Chinese language and writing of today has grown but little from that old form. They have no grammar, at least as we understand the term; a word can mean twenty different things, dependent upon its position in a sentence. And so it is with the old phonetic writing. A sign meant this or that dependent upon its position with other signs; and then again minor signs accompanied it to still further explain it. Note the terra-cotta tablets found at Nineveh; they are veritable graphic concordances. There are three columns of signs: the central one is composed of the cuneiform