Bones have been from very early times the recipients of men’s marks; the earliest of these, however, were only copies of things seen. But inscriptions and symbols were presently scratched on them, and the blade bones of buffaloes in North America as well as the shoulder blades of sheep used by the Arabs are equally convenient for writing upon. In Sumatra inscriptions are commonly cut in flat pieces of bone. Instances of inscriptions in ivory are very numerous, and the finest examples of these occur in the case of the Roman consular diptychs which are described a little further on.
Information as to direction is still often given by means of marks or “blazes” on trees, a survival of a primitive method, and American lumbermen or “loggers” cut hieroglyphic marks of ownership on their logs when they send them down stream.
In times of trouble it often happens that primitive methods of communication are resorted to, like that received by a Cavalier from his lady love who heard that the Roundheads were after him—she sent him a feather, and he flew away and escaped.
Fig. 6.
Such symbolical messages are common enough among savage tribes, but without some key it is almost impossible to interpret them. They are so various in their composition that no useful analysis of them can be made. On one such message from West Africa, strung on a string of flat fibre knotted at each end, are a bit of shell, a bit of fur, a bean, a cylindrical stick, a piece of leather, a mass of frog’s eggs or something like it, a flat piece of bark, a feather, a tooth and a shell. In another are two pieces of flat glass kept together with red thread, and two teeth on each side of it, all strung on fibre, and so on.
Fig. 7.
The Battas of Sumatra use different and probably more elaborate messages, as they consist of carefully cut strips of wood, resembling the old spillikins with which our childhood’s days were made happy. These strips of thin wood, about three inches in length, are cut into various shapes which have no obvious collective meaning. In one of them is a capital model of a little broom, accompanied apparently by a series of little clubs and spikes. Such a message might have been sent by an absent brave to his squaw at home, and may have meant that if she didn’t sweep up the wigwam before his arrival she would experience the effect of one or other of the clubs.