nd
for ideas, and they are numerically infinite. The transmission of
knowledge by means of the latter is consequently attended with most
disproportionate labor. It is almost as if we could quote nothing from
an author unless we could recollect his exact words. We have a right to
look for excellent memories where such a mode is in vogue, and in the
present instance we are not disappointed. "These savages," exclaims La
Hontan, "have the happiest memories in the world!" It was etiquette at
their councils for each speaker to repeat verbatim all his predecessors
had said, and the whites were often astonished and confused at the
verbal fidelity with which the natives recalled the transactions of long
past treaties. Their songs were inexhaustible. An instance is on record
where an Indian sang two hundred on various subjects.[18-1] Such a fact
reminds us of a beautiful expression of the elder Humboldt: "Man," he
says, "regarded as an animal, belongs to one of the singing species; but
his notes are always associated with ideas." The youth who were educated
at the public schools of ancient Mexico--for that realm, so far from
neglecting the cause of popular education, established houses for
gratuitous instruction, and to a certain extent made the attendance upon
them obligatory--learned by rote long orations, poems, and prayers with
a facility astonishing to the conquerors, and surpassing anything they
were accustomed to see in the universities of Old Spain. A phonetic
system actually weakens the retentive powers of the mind by offering a
more facile plan for preserving thought. "_Ce que je mets sur papier, je
remets de ma memoire_" is an expression of old Montaigne which he could
never have used had he employed ideographic characters.

Memory, however, is of far less importance than a free activity of
thought, untrammelled by forms or precedents, and ever alert to novel
combinations of ideas. Give a race this and it will guide it to
civilization as surely as the needle directs the ship to its haven. It
is here that ideographic writing reveals its fatal inferiority. It is
forever specifying, materializing, dealing in minutiae. In the Egyptian
symbolic alphabet there is a figure for a virgin, another for a married
woman, for a widow without offspring, for a widow with one child, two
children, and I know not in how many other circumstances, but for
_woman_ there is no sign. It must be so in the nature of things, for the
symbol repre