"1

represent an infant, before a cross, will best suffice to illustrate the characteristics of this form of writing. The sculpture is given by Dupaix, Lord Kingsborough, and Stephens, and has been made the subject of many extravagant and profitless theories and conjectures. Mr. Stephens vouches for the accuracy of Mr. Catherwood's drawings of the hieroglyphics both of Copan and Palenque; and he adds in describing those of the latter site: "There is one important fact to be noticed. The hieroglyphics are the same as were found at Copan and Quirigua. The intermediate country is now occupied by races of Indians speaking many different languages, and entirely unintelligible to each other; but there is room for the belief that the whole of this country was once occupied by the same race, speaking the same language, or, at least, having the same written characters.' The impressions produced on the mind by the investigation of the few specimens yet recovered of those ancient and still unintelligible native chronicles, are of a singularly mixed kind. They furnish proofs of intellectual progress which cannot be gainsayed, while baffling us at the same time by a mystery which all our higher intellectual progress leaves still unsolved. leaves still unsolved. It would be presumptuous indeed to deny the possibility of some future solution of the mystery; but if such is ever found it will be by a totally different process from that which led Young and Champollion to the solution of the Egyptian riddle. In the specimen given here (Fig. 43), from the Palenque tablet, the inscription begins with a large initial symbol, extending over two lines in depth, like the illuminated initials of a mediæval manuscript. It is obviously not a simple figure, but compounded of various parts, so abbreviated that their original pictorial significance has as utterly disappeared,

1 Incidents of Travel in Central America, vol. ii. ch. 20.

as the meaning of the primary monosyllables surviving in syllabic fragments in the vocabularies of living languages. The principal figure, which might be described as a shield, reappears in combination with a human profile, in the fifth line; again, slightly modified, in another combination, at the end of the same line; and twice, if not three times, in the line below. In carefully com

paring all the examples of such hieroglyphic inscriptions hitherto published, the like recombinations of the several elements of detached figures are detected; while, as seen in the last line of the example given above, occa sional signs, closely corresponding to European alphabetic figures occur, in union with hieroglyphic groups. But, while the recurrence of the same signs, and the reconstruction of groups out of the detached members of others, clearly indicate a written language, and not a

mere pictorial suggestion of associated ideas, like the Mexican picture-writing, it is not alphabetic writing. In the most complicated tablet of African hieroglyphics, each object is distinct, and its representative significance is rarely difficult to trace. But the majority of the

hieroglyphics of Palenque or Copan appear as if constructed on the same polysynthetic principle which gives the peculiar and distinctive character to the languages of the New World. This is still more apparent when we turn to the highly elaborated inscriptions on the colossal figures of Copan, illustrated on a subsequent page. In these all ideas of simple phonetic signs utterly disappear. Like the bunch-words, as they have been called, of the American languages, they seem each to be compounded of a number of parts of the primary symbols used in picture-writing, while the pictorial origin of the whole becomes clearly apparent. In comparing these minutely elaborated characters with those on the tables, it is obvious that a system of abbreviation is employed in the latter; and thus each group appears with the greater probability to partake of that peculiar characteristic of the whole grammatical structure of American language, as shown in its word-sentences. The plan of thought of the American languages is concrete, while certain euphonic laws lead to the dropping of portions of the words compounded together, in a manner exceedingly puzzling to the grammarian. By the same compounding process, new words are formed, as in the Algonquin shominaubo, wine, i.e., sho, a grape, min, a berry, aubo, liquor; ozhebiegunaubo, ink, i.e., ozheta, a prefix signifying to prepare to do, or act; nindozheta, I prepare to do; ozhebiegade, a writer; whence ozhebiegai, he writes; and aubo, liquor. The latter, like all abstract terms, is only used in compound words, as ishkodaiwaubo, fire-liquid, or whisky. The

specific word for water is nebeesh. So also makuhdawekoonuhya, a priest, or clergyman, i.e., muhkuhda, black; ekoonuhya, he is so dressed, the person who dresses in black, etc. An analogous process seems dimly discernible in the abbreviated compound characters of the Palenque inscription. But if the inference be correct, this of itself would serve to indicate that the Central American hieroglyphics are not used as phonetic, or pure alphabetic signs; and this idea receives more certain confirmation from the extreme rarity with which the same group recurs.

These inscriptions cannot, however, be confounded with the Mexican picture-writings, by any one who attempts an intelligent comparison of the two. In the latter, as in a picture, the eye searches for the most prominent features of the ideographic picturing, and interprets the various parts as independent members of one representation. But the Palenque inscriptions have all the characteristics of a written language in a matured state of development. They appear to be read in horizontal lines, and from left to right; for the groups on both the Palenque tablets begin with a large hieroglyphic on the left-hand corner; and the left-hand figure for several lines thereafter occupies a double space on the line, as though it were equivalent to the use of capitals in the beginning of the lines in verse. It is further noticeable that in the frequent occurrence of human and animal heads among the sculptured characters they invariably look towards the left; an indication, as it appears to me, not only of the lines being read horizontally from left to right, but also that they are the graven inscriptions of a lettered people, who were accustomed to write with the same characters on paper or skins. Indeed, the pictorial groups on the Copan statues seem to be the true hieroglyphic characters; while the Palenque inscriptions show

the abbreviated hieratic writing. To the sculptor the direction of the characters was a matter of no moment; but if the scribe held his pen, or style, in his right hand, like the modern clerk, he would as naturally draw the left profile as we slope our current hand to the right.

The enterprising traveller, to whose researches we owe so much of all the knowledge yet acquired of those singularly interesting evidences of the intellectual progress of an ancient American people, dwells with fond favour on the idea he latterly adopted, that the ruins he explored were of no very remote date; because he felt that the nearer he could bring the builders of those cities to our own times, the greater is our chance of recovering the key to their language and the inscriptions in which their history now lies entombed. Palenque, it cannot be doubted, was a desolate ruin at the date of the Conquest. Backward behind the era of Europe's first knowledge of the New World, we have to grope our way to that age in which living men read its graven tablets, and spoke the language in which they are inscribed; yet other cities survive to share in the later desolation of the Conquest, and Stephens thus sanguinely records his latest cherished hopes: "Throughout the country the convents are rich in manuscripts and documents written by the early fathers, caciques, and Indians, who very soon acquired the knowledge of Spanish and the art of writing. These have never been examined with the slightest reference to this subject; and I cannot help thinking that some precious memorial is now mouldering in the library of a neighbouring convent, which would determine the history of some one of these ruined cities; moreover, I cannot help believing that the tablets of hieroglyphics will yet be read. No strong curiosity has hitherto been directed to them; vigour and acuteness of intellect, knowledge and learning, have never