With these changes by abandonment and adoption comes fashion, which has its strong effect. It is even exemplified where least expected, i. e., in Stamboul. Every one knows that the descendants of the Prophet alone are entitled to wear green turbans, but a late Sultan, not being of the blood of Mohammed, could not wear the color, so the emirs who could do so carefully abstained from green in his presence and the color for the time was unfashionable.
As the evolution of clothing commenced with painting and tattooing, it may be admitted that what is now called fashion must have had its effect on the earlier as on the later forms of personal decoration. Granting that there was an ideographic origin to all designs painted on the person, the ambition or vanity of individuals to be distinctive and to excel must soon have introduced varieties and afterward imitations of such patterns, colors, or combinations as favorably struck the local taste. The subject therefore is much confused.
An additional suggestion comes from the study of the Mexican codices. In them color often seems to be used according to the fancy of the scribe. Compare pages 108 and 109 of the Codex Vaticanus, in Kingsborough, Vol. II, with pages 4 and 5 of the Codex Telleriano Remensis, in part 4 of Kingsborough, Vol. I, where the figures and their signification are evidently the same, but the coloration is substantially reversed.
A comparison of Henry R. Schoolcraft’s published coloration with the facts found by the recent examination of the present writer is set forth with detail on page [202], supra.
In his copious illustrations colors were exhibited freely and with stated significance, whereas, in fact, the general rule in regard to the birch-bark rolls is that they were never colored at all; indeed, the bark was not adapted to coloration. His colors were painted on and over the true scratchings, according to his own fancy. The metaphorical coloring was also used by him in a manner which, to any thorough student of the Indian philosophy and religions, seems absurd. Metaphysical significance is attached to some of the colored devices, or, as he calls them, symbols, which could never have been entertained by a people in the stage of culture of the Ojibwa, and those devices, in fact, were ideograms or iconograms.
SECTION 4.
GESTURE AND POSTURE SIGNS DEPICTED.
Among people where a system of ideographic gesture signs has prevailed it would be expected that their form would appear in any mode of pictorial representation used with the object of conveying ideas or recording facts. When a gesture sign had been established and it became necessary or desirable to draw a character or design to convey the same idea, nothing could be more natural than to use the graphic form or delineation which was known and used in the gesture sign. It was but one more step, and an easy one, to fasten upon bark, skins, or rocks the evanescent air pictures of the signs.
In the paper “Sign language among the North American Indians,” published in the First Ann. Rep. of the Bureau of Ethnology, a large number of instances were given of the reproduction of gesture lines in the pictographs made by those Indians, and they appeared to be most frequent when there was an attempt to convey subjective ideas. It was suggested, therefore, that those pictographs which, in the absence of positive knowledge, are the most difficult of interpretation were those to which the study of sign-language might be applied with advantage. The topic is now more fully discussed. Many pictographs in the present work, the meaning of which is definitely known from direct sources, are noted in connection with the gesture-signs corresponding with the same idea, which signs are also understood from independent evidence or legitimate deduction.
Dr. Edkins (c) makes the following remarks regarding the Chinese characters, which are applicable also to the picture-writing of the North American Indians, and indeed to that of all peoples among whom it has been cultivated:
The use of simple natural shapes, such as the mouth, nose, eye, ear, hand, foot, as well as the shape of branches, trees, grass, caves, holes, rivers, the bow, the spear, the knife, the tablet, the leaf—these formed, in addition to pictures of animals, much of the staple of Chinese ideographs.