This is a far more agreeable idea than that the Indians are being everywhere starved out of existence by the encroachments of the European. But that portion of the mixed offspring which adhered to the Indian tribe, and became Indian in its habits, affords a still more interesting subject of speculation. On the Red River there is a settlement of half-breeds, numbering about six thousand. A marked difference, we are told, “is observable, according to their white paternity. The French half-breeds are more lively and frank in their bearing, but also less prone to settle down to drudgery of farming, or other routine duties of civilised life, than those chiefly of Scottish descent.” If in both cases the half-breed has been entirely educated by its Indian parent, this would be a good instance of the influence of race as separable from the influence of education. These half-breeds are generally superior in physical as well as mental qualities, and have greater powers of endurance than any of the native tribes exhibit. Mr Wilson assures us “that the last traces of the Red blood will disappear, not by the extinction of the Indian tribes, but by the absorption of the half-breed minority into the new generations of the predominant race.”
Of the warlike tribes of native Indians some have been induced to settle down as agriculturists. Some are Roman Catholics, some Protestants. But we believe it may be stated that all signal amendments or progressive changes have been accompanied by a mixture of European blood. To this very day the full-blooded Indian despises the civilisation of the white man, or at least thinks it something that may be good for the white man, but by no means good for him. The fierce tribes that constituted the famous confederacy of the Iroquois, and who have settled in Canada, have been all more or less tamed, but they have all lost the purity of their race; and when we hear of the hunter of the prairies taking upon himself the mode of life of European colonists, we may be sure that this change has been facilitated by an intermixture of the two races. Some of these tribes have forgotten their own language, and speak only a French patois.
We do not imply by this observation that the native Indian would have been incapable of advancing by a slow and natural progression of their own on the road of civilisation: on the contrary, we believe that the civilisation of the Aztecs and the Peruvians may be seen in its earliest stage amongst the Iroquois. But when the European encounters the savage, there is a gap between them which the latter cannot suddenly traverse. The intermediate steps are not presented to him. The time is not given him by which slow-changing habits can be formed and transmitted. He is required to proceed at a faster pace than his savage nature can accomplish. Now, as every generation that has advanced upon its predecessors, transmits, together with its knowledge, some increasing aptitude for the acquisition of such knowledge, there is no difficulty in believing that the savage would be expedited in his career of civilisation as well by an intermixture of race as by a participation of knowledge.
The whole chapter of Mr Wilson on the Red Race is well worthy of perusal. The reader will find in it many interesting details, which, of course, our space will not permit us to allude to. We shall conclude our notice by some reference to a topic especially interesting when we speak of the progress of civilisation—namely, the mode of transmitting ideas, the art of writing, or letters. Our author, according to his favourite phraseology, entitles his chapter on this subject ‘The Intellectual Instinct: Letters.’
The origin of language may be open to discussion. Its gradual growth from the wants, the social passions, the organisation, the mimetic and reasoning powers of man, may to many persons seem an unsatisfactory account. But no one disputes that writing is an invention of man. Even if the steps of this invention had not been traced, we should have been unable to frame any other hypothesis with regard to an art possessed by one people and not possessed by another. We may define writing to be the transmission of ideas by visible and permanent signs, instead of by momentary sounds and gestures. The art of writing, it must be remembered, is not complete till the characters upon the paper, or the parchment, or the plaster of the wall, or the graven rock, interpret themselves to one who knows the conventional value of the several signs. So long as any picture-writing or symbolic figures act merely as aids to the memory, in retaining a history of events which is, in fact, transmitted by oral tradition, writing is not yet invented. The picture, however faithful, gives its meaning only to those who know many other facts which are not in the picture itself. When a system of signs has been invented, by which alone the ideas of one person, or one generation, can be communicated to another person or another generation, then the art has been attained, whether those signs are hieroglyphics or alphabetical, whether they are signs of things or signs of words.
This is necessary to be borne in mind, because there is a certain use of pictorial and symbolic signs which is in danger of being confounded with the perfect hieroglyph; and we are inclined to think this confusion has been made with regard to some of the sculptured remains discovered in Central America. We doubt if these “hieroglyphics,” which scholars are invited to study and to interpret, are hieroglyphics as the word is understood by the Egyptologist. Granting that they always have a meaning, and are not introduced, in some cases, as mere ornaments (just as we introduce the heads of stags or the figures of little children on any vase we desire to ornament), still it may be a meaning of that kind which could be only intelligible to one who from other sources knew the history or the fable it was intended to bring to remembrance. A representation of this kind, half pictorial and half symbolic, would help to keep alive the memory of an event; but, the memory of it once extinct, it could not revive the knowledge of the event to us. We should waste our ingenuity in vain attempts to read what was not, in fact, any kind of writing.
The Peruvians had manifestly not advanced beyond a system of mnemonics, a kind of memoria technica. With certain knots in strings of different colours they had associated certain ideas. A Peruvian woman could show you a bundle of knotted strings and tell you her whole life “was there.” To her it was, but to no one else. If all the Peruvians agreed to associate the history of Peru with other bundles of knotted cords, their quipus would still be only an aid to memory; the history itself must be conveyed from one mind to another by oral communication. Some of the North American Indians had their wampum, their many-coloured belt, into which they talked their treaty, or any other matter it was desirable to remember. The Mexicans had mingled symbols with their picture-writing, but they had not wrought the hieroglyphic into a system, by means of which alone ideas could be conveyed from one generation to another. With them it could not be said that the art of writing was known. But antiquarians have formed, it seems, a different opinion of the mixture of symbol and picture discovered in the ruins of Copan and Palenque; and, partly on this ground, they arrived at the conclusion that these cities were built and inhabited by a people in advance of the Mexicans or Aztecs discovered by the Spaniards. Mr Wilson says very distinctly of those mysterious sculptures: “They are no rude abbreviations, like the symbols either of Indian or Aztec picture-writing; but rather suggest the idea of a matured system of ideography in its last transitional stage, before becoming a word-alphabet like that of the Chinese at the present day.”
We should be open to the charge of great presumption, if, with nothing before us but a few engravings by which to guide our judgment, we ventured to offer an opinion opposed to that of Mr Wilson, or of others who have made the subject one of especial study. But opposite to the very page (p. 140, vol. ii.) from which we take this last sentence we have quoted, Mr Wilson gives us an engraving of what are denominated “hieroglyphics.” It appears to us as if the pillar here represented had been divided into compartments, and each compartment had been filled by the artist with some appropriate subject, generally some human figure whose action and attitude are unintelligible to us; but the whole conveys the idea, not of a series of hieroglyphics, but of individual representations, each of which has its own independent meaning. Other engravings, indeed, approximate more nearly to the hieroglyphic; the arbitrary sign is more conspicuous, and there is a more frequent repetition of the same subject; but when we consider the poverty of invention that even in later times afflicts the arts, and the tendency to repeat and to copy which is very noticeable in rude times, we are not surprised that the same subject is often found on the same monument, or that it has spread from Copan to Palenque. There is nothing in the engravings before us, or in the account given of them, which proves that a really hieroglyphic system had been invented; and we cannot but suspect that those who undertake the task of deciphering them will inevitably fail, not because the key cannot be found, but because no key ever existed.
Suppose a monument erected or a medal struck in honour of one of our own excellent missionaries; suppose it represented the missionary-standing with one foot on a broken image, or idol, and that by his side knelt some half-naked savage with a cross in his hands—this mixture of picture and of symbol would tell its tale very intelligibly to us, for we have heard before of the labours of the missionary. But suppose this and other pictures of the same kind were handed down to a remote posterity, who had no information except what the pictures themselves conveyed by which to understand them, what hopeless perplexities would they for ever remain! And the use of the repeated symbol might lead to the persuasion that they were composed on some hieroglyphic system. We might imagine learned men toiling for ever over such representation, and never coming to any satisfactory result.
What different impressions the same pictorial representation may convey to two different persons, we have many an amusing instance of in the history of our Egyptian discoveries, or efforts at discovery. We borrow an example from the pages before us. On the wall of the temple at Philæ, at the first cataract of the Nile, a figure is seen seated at work on what seems a potter’s wheel, and there is a group of hieroglyphics over its head. One learned translator reads and explains thus:—“Kaum the Creator, on his wheel, moulds the divine members of Osiris (the type of man) in the shining house of life, or the solar disk.” Another learned man, Mr Birch of the British Museum, soars, if possible, still higher for a meaning:—“Phtah Totonem, the father of beginnings, is setting in motion the egg of the sun and moon, director of the gods of the upper world.” Mr Wilson, we presume, in accordance with a still later interpretation, calls this figure simply the “ram-headed god Kneph,” without explaining what he is doing with his wheel. If the picture and the hieroglyphic together lead to such various results, we may easily conceive what wild work would be made by an attempt to interpret a pictorial representation alone.