[93] Eusebius (“Ecclesiastical Hist.,” ch. xxxvi.) says, speaking of St Ignatius—“He exhorted them to adhere firmly to the tradition of the apostles; which, for the sake of greater security, he deemed it necessary to attest by committing it to writing.” I do not remember to have seen this quoted in testimony and proof of ecclesiastical tradition.
[94] Goguet (“Origin of Laws,” i. 29) says—“The first laws of all nations were composed in verse, and sung. Apollo, according to a very ancient tradition, was one of the first legislators. The same tradition says that he published his laws to the sound of his lyre; that is to say, that he had set them to music. We have certain proof that the first laws of Greece were a kind of song. The laws of the ancient inhabitants of Spain were verses, which they sung. Tuiston was regarded by the Germans as their first lawgiver. They said he put his laws into verses and songs. This ancient custom was long kept up by several nations.”
E. Warburton (“Conquest of Canada,” i. 214) says—“The want of any written or hieroglyphic records of the past among the Northern Indians was to some extent supplied by the accurate memories of their old men; they were able to repeat speeches of four or five hours’ duration, and delivered many years before, without error, or even hesitation; and to hand them down from generation to generation with equal accuracy.... On great and solemn occasions belts of wampum were used as aids to recollection ... when a treaty or compact was negotiated.”
[95] Vide H. N. Coleridge (“Greek Classic Poets,” p. 38–42), in speaking of the “Dionysiacs, the Thebaids, the Epigoniads, Naupactica, genealogies, and the other works of that sort,” p. 44, he adds—“Just as in the Indian and Persian epics, in the Northern Eddas, in the poem of the ‘Cid,’ in the early chronicles of every nation with which we are acquainted, one story follows another story in the order of mere history; and the skill and fire of the poet are shown, not in the artifice of grouping a hundred figures into one picture, but in raising admiration by the separate beauty of each successive picture. They tell the tale as the tale had been told to them, and leave out nothing.”
[96] According to the account which the Chinese themselves give of their annals, the works of Confucius were proscribed, after his death, by the Emperor Chi-Hoangti, and all the copies, including the Chu-King, were recovered from the dictation of an old man who had retained them in memory.
“The great moralist of the East” himself, Confucius, asserted—“that he only wrought on materials already existing.” Vide Klaproth ap., Cardinal Wiseman, “Science and Rev. Religion,” ii. p. 49.
In the article in the Cornhill Magazine, Nov. 1871, containing the valuable collection of Dravidian (South Indian) folk-songs, it is said, p. 577, that “they are handed down from generation to generation, entirely vivâ voce, and from the minstrels have passed into public use.”
[97] The Duke of Argyll (“Primeval Man,” p. 30) says—“Knowledge, for example, or ignorance of the use of metals are, as we shall see, characteristics on which great stress is laid” (by the advocates of the “savage theory”). “Now, as regards this point, as Whately truly says, the narrative of Genesis distinctly states that this kind of knowledge did not belong to mankind at first.... It is assumed in the savage theory that the presence or absence of this knowledge stands in close and natural connection with the presence or absence of other and higher kinds of knowledge, of which an acquaintance with metals is but a symbol and a type. Within certain limits this is true.”
[98] Presuming total ignorance of writing—its invention at any period seems to me much more marvellous than the discovery of printing after the invention of writing. For the rest we have seen that writing was known at an early period to the Chaldæans and Egyptians, and probably to the Chinese and Japanese, and to the Medians ([ch. xii].) Plutarch tells us that a law of Theseus, written on a column of stone, remained even to the time of Demosthenes.
[99] Phil. Hist.