A strict modern illustration of this case is a collection of battle flags taken or carried in a certain war, campaign or battle. Or again if a modern hunter should have all the spoils of a certain hunt stuffed and mounted as a record of the hunt, this would be of the same nature—a whole object record collection with an object to stand for every individual.
The sample or specimen whole object record as distinguished from the individual record is in modern times extensively known and used in the sale of goods by travelling salesmen. In its rudiments as a means of visible communication of ideas it was doubtless as old and perhaps older even than the keeping of trophies for record. If e.g. man was herbivorous before he was carnivorous then doubtless primitive man scouting for food would bring back specimens for his family just as a modern boy may bring in specimens of the wild grapes or berries that he has found for information of the folks at home. The best modern illustration of the sample or specimen whole object is in museums, menageries, zoological and botanical gardens, and the like, where specimens of various kinds of objects are gathered to stand for classes, without any special regard to the number in the class.
Museums in general illustrate object record. The historical museums generally and collections of historical relics large and small, together with mineral, plant or animal collections of rare objects, otherwise unknown, or species otherwise extinct (e.g. the American bison) are of the nature of individual whole object records, while all museums come so close to the idea of the library, either in the matter of record or in the purpose of message or information, that one is tempted to describe museums as rudimentary libraries, and libraries as more complex museums. Art museums are in this aspect a sort of transition between the museum proper or whole object library and the library proper or the image-symbol-record collection.
Whole object record is, however, evidently cumbersome, and man, observing this, early learned a fact very significant for the history of handwriting i.e. that for record, reminder, or information, a part of an object may serve just as well as a whole object. This principle of the abbreviation of signs for the sake of economy is perhaps the most striking and consistent principle in the whole history of handwriting. It is the principle which led not only from the whole to the part and sample but from the part object to the mnemonic object, from object to image, from image to ideogram, and which prevails throughout the whole farther development of phonetic handwriting, during which picture phonetic signs became more and more conventionalized, through syllabic writing into alphabetic, and it is the law which has produced the numerous variations in the numberless historical alphabets, issuing also finally in numberless systems of stenography. This abbreviation is very early found in war trophies and in hunting trophies. In war it was found that the heads, hands, ears or scalps of enemies or even the left hand or right hand or ear, as conventionally agreed upon, was just as good an evidence of prowess and much more transportable than whole bodies—and Borneo and Filipino head hunters and American Indian scalpers have practised this discovery in very recent times.
In the case of hunting trophies the history was the same. Actual bodies brought back from a hunting trip were not altogether a permanent record, but after the tribal feast or sacrifice (commonly perhaps in earliest times both in one) the head and skin remained and formed a potentially more permanent record. Even in modern times such skins may be kept as wholes—stuffed for museum purposes or as hunting trophies, and they are, indeed, often mounted as rugs with both head and tail attached. In this stage they form what may be still counted as whole object records but from this stage object abbreviation followed as rapidly as in war trophies. If the skin was separated from head and horns for economic reasons, either was found to serve the purposes of record. A man’s collection of pelts e.g. is obviously a collection of hunting records as well as a collection of wealth. The Egyptian determinative for quadruped is, as a matter of fact, the picture not of a whole animal but of a skin with tail and without head. On the other hand, head and horns served equally as well for record as skin and tail, whether the purpose was a mere record of exploits or a record of sacrifices. This precise stage is amply represented in the modern hunting lodge with its heads of moose or other animals, and it is possible that the expression so many “head of cattle” is a relic of this stage.
In each of these cases the principle of the characteristic part obtains i.e. the abbreviation is not beyond the point where the object can be recognized at sight as standing for a certain animal.
The principle of the characteristic part once established, the tendency to abbreviation for the sake of economy in transportation, storage, or exhibition, led rapidly to the use of the very simplest unmistakable part showing the individual and then to the simplest unmistakable part showing kind. In the case of war-trophies head was reduced to scalp, and this was conventionalized again so that the trophy scalp consisted of a very small portion from a particular point on the head. In the case of hunting trophies, the head was reduced to perhaps ears or horns, tusks or teeth. The process is found definitely illustrated in the Cretan history in the reduction of the ox’s head to simple horns in ritual use, and vestiges of this are probably also to be found in the symbolic use of horns on altars, horns on men as a symbol of power, and the like. On the other hand the skin and tail separated from the horns followed the same law of progressive economy and was reduced perhaps to the tail only (the fox’s brush) or the claws (the primitive claw necklaces).
The modern bounty on wolf scalps contains the whole principle of characteristic part abbreviation up to this point in a nutshell. It is the smallest unmistakable readily recognized and nonduplicable part. It is important for individual record that it should not be possible to collect two bounties on one wolf or to boast of two fish caught or two dead enemies, where there has been but one.
It is thus not fancy or jest to say the scalp belt of an American Indian chief (albeit this did not play such a part in the Indian world as is commonly imagined), or the tiger-tooth necklace of the African chief, is a collection of records representing a rather advanced stage of evolution.
Abbreviations in the case of sample records may be carried one step farther still, for a single eagle’s feather or a very small piece of fur shows kind just as well as a head or tail or a whole skin.