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Show \ HorwAH.] PICTOGRAPHY. 287 of a mnemonic song showing characters as thus drawn. The specimen was obtained at White Earth, and the entire song is presented on PI. xvi, C. A piece of bark obtained at Red Lake, and known to have been incised more than seventy years ago, is shown on the right lower corner of PL xix. The drawings are upon the outer surface and are remarkably deep and distinct. The left hand specimen is from the last named locality, and of the same period, and presents pictographs drawn upon the inner surface. In a majority of songs the characters are drawn so as to be read from left to right, in some from right to left, and occasionally one is found to combine both styles, being truly boustrophic. Specimens have been obtained upon which the characters were drawn around and near the margin of an oblong piece of bark, thus appearing in the form of an irregular circle. The pictographic delineation of ideas is found to exist chiefly among the shamans, hunters, and travelers of the Ojibwa, and there does not appear to be a recognized system by which the work of any one person is fully intelligible to another. A record may be recognized as pertaining to the Mide' ceremonies, as a song used when hunting plants, etc.; but it would be impossible for one totally unfamiliar with the record to state positively whether the initial character was at the left or the right hand. The figures are more than simply mnemonic; they are ideographic, and frequently possess additional interest from the fact that several ideas are expressed in combination. Col. Garrick Mallery, U. S. Army, in a paper entitled " Recently Discovered Algonkian Pictographs," read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Cleveland, 1888, expressed this fact in the following words: It is desirable to explain the mode of using the Mide' and other bark records of the Ojibwa and also those of other Algonkian tribes to be mentioned in this paper. The comparison made by Dr. E. B. Tylor of the pictorial alphabet to teach children " A was an archer," etc., is not strictly appropriate in this case. The devices are not only mnemonic, but are also ideographic and descriptive. They are not merely invented to express or memorize the subject, but are evolved therefrom. To persons acquainted with secret societies a good comparison for the charts or rolls would be what is called the tressel board of the Masonic order, which is printed and published and publicly exposed without exhibiting any of the secrets of the order, yet is not only significant, but useful to the esoteric in assistance to their memory as to degrees and details of ceremony. A more general mode of explaining the so- called symbolism is by a suggestion that the charts of the order or the song of a myth should be likened to the popular illustrated poems and songs lately published in Harper's Magazine for instance, " Sally in our Alley," where every stanza has an appropriate illustration. Now, suppose that the text was obliterated forever, indeed the art of reading lost, the illustrations remaining, as also the memory to many persons of the ballad. The illustrations kept in order would supply always the order of the stanzas and also the general subject- matter of each particular stanza and the latter would be a reminder of the words. This is what the rolls of birch bark do to the initiated Ojibwa, and what Schoolcraft pretended in some cases to show, but what for actual |