Fig. 1289.—Fraudulent pictograph.
The large figures on the border can not be pretended to be of Indian origin. The smaller interior figures constituting the body of the chart are all, with trifling exceptions, exact copies of figures published and fully explained in G. Copway’s “Traditional History, etc., of the Ojibway Nation,” op. cit. Several of the same figures appear above in the present work. The principal exceptions are, first, a modern knife; second, a bird with a decidedly un-Indian human head, and, third, a cross with two horizontal arms of equal length. The figures from Copway are not in the exact order given in his list and it is possible that they may have been placed in their present order to simulate the appearance of some connected narrative or communication, which could readily be done in the same manner as the words of a dictionary could be cut out and pasted in some intelligent sequence.
Among the curiosities of literature in connection with the interpretation of pictographs may be mentioned La Vèritè sur le Livre des Sauvages, par L’Abbé Em. Domenech, Paris, 1861, and Researches into the Lost Histories of America, by W. S. Blacket, London and Philadelphia, 1884.
Fig. 1290.—Chinese characters.
The following remarks of Dr. Edkins (h) are also in point:
The early Jesuits were accustomed to interpret Chinese characters on the wildest principles. They detected religious mysteries in the most unexpected situations. Kwei “treacherous,” is written with Kieu “nine,” and above it one of the covering radicals, Fig. 1290a. This, then, was Satan at the head of the nine ranks of angels. The character, same Fig., b, c’hwen “a boat,” was believed to contain an allusion to the deluge. On the left side is the ark and on the right are the signs for eight and for persons. The day for this mode of explaining the Chinese characters has gone by.