e, around the campfire, and in the primitive family. Stories
of the past, being rehearsed over and over, became a permanent
heritage, passing on from generation to generation. But this method of
descent of knowledge was very indefinite, because story-tellers,
influenced by their environment, continually built the present into the
past, and so the truth was not clearly expressed.

Slowly man began to make a permanent record of deeds and events, the
first beginnings of which were very feeble, and were included in
drawings on the walls of caves, inscriptions on bone, stone, and ivory,
and symbols woven in garments. All represented the first beginnings of
the representative art of language.

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Gradually picture-writing became so systematized that an expression of
continuous thought might be recorded and transferred from one to
another through the observation of the symbols universally recognized.
But these pictures on rocks and ivory, and later on tablets, have been
preserved, and are expressive of the first steps of man in the art of
written language. The picture-writing so common to savages and
barbarians finally passes from a simple _rebus_ to a very complex
written language, as in the case of the Egyptian or Mexican. The North
American Indians used picture-writing in describing battles, or an
expedition across a lake, or an army on a march, or a buffalo hunt. A
simple picture shows that fifty-one warriors, led by a chief and his
assistant, in five canoes, took three days to cross a lake and land
their forces on the other side.

The use of pictographs is the next step in the process of written
language. It represents a generalized form of symbols which may be put
together in such a way as to express complete thoughts. Originally
they were merely symbols or signs of ideas, which by being slightly
changed in form or position led to the expression of a complete thought.

Following the pictograph is the ideograph, which is but one more step
in the progress of systematic writing. Here the symbol has become so
generalized that it has a significance quite independent of its origin.
In other words, it becomes idealized and conventionalized, so that a
specific symbol stood for a universal idea. It could be made specific
by changing its form or position. All that was necessary now was to
have a sufficient number of general symbols representing ideas, to
build up a constructive language. The American Indian an