ative or symbolic significance. They are no crude 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. Such I conceive it in a less simple condition actually to have been a holophrastic or wordsentence alphabet; and, as such, a uniformity of hieroglyphics may have been compatible with the existence of diverse dialects throughout the extensive region in which they were used. If, however, any single living language is calculated to aid in the attempt to solve this great riddle of the American sphinx, it is not to the Mexican, but to the Maya language that the imagination turns for expected aid: that language still believed to be spoken by the Candones, or unbaptized Indians, of the region of the mysterious city seen by the Cura of Quiché, from the lofty summit of the Sierra.

But

The elaborately sculptured colossal figures already referred to, found on various sites, but chiefly at Copan, are covered on the back, and in some cases also on the sides, with rows of hieroglyphics executed with a minuteness of detail, compared with which those on the tablets of Palenque appear as mere demotic characters. the elaborateness of their execution only increases the mystery of their significance, and confirms the conviction that so far from their having any phonetic value, either of primary radical sounds, or of simple words, each hieroglyphic embraces the abbreviated depiction or symbolism of a complete sentence. Fig. 44 represents the back of one of the colossal idols at Copan, sculptured with a succession of hieroglyphics in double columns. Each compartment contains human figures, sometimes curiously grouped together, and as grotesque and disproportioned as those of the Mexican picture-writing.

They are marked also by great variety in dress and ornaments; but the mythic significance only becomes the more obscure to us by the minuter details of its characters in this example. On the back of another of the Copan idols, the hieroglyphic characters, though more elaborate, closely resemble those of Palenque.

In tracing the natural progress of a native American system of writing through so many successive stages, from the primary and infantile condition of the rude Indian's birch-bark paintings to the most advanced stage of letters short of true alphabetic characters and phonetic signs, it is impossible to overlook the evidence thus afforded of the great lapse of time which is thereby implied. The Chinese, whose civilisation and arts present so many points of resemblance to those of the New World, had advanced little, if at all, beyond the same stage in their system of writing, with its two hundred and fourteen hieroglyphic characters, when they paused, and left to more favoured races the simpler vehicles of written thought. But by this arresting of their intellectual development at the stage of symbolized ideas instead of radical sounds, they possess a series of written characters which are employed with equal facility in Cochin-China, Japan, Loo-Choo, Corea, and in China itself, for expressing the words of languages mutually unintelligible. In this there is no analogy to the common use of the Roman alphabet among so many of the nations of Europe; but in our simple Arabic, or even in the Roman numerals, we have an apt illustration of written characters representing ideas, entirely independent of specific words or sounds. Thus 20 equally signifies viginti, venti, vingt, or twenty; and when we write Louis XIV., it may be read with equal correctness, Louis the fourteenth, or Louis quatorze. In reality, however, the analogy is greater when we compare the

symbolic writing of Egypt with the supposed graven signs of word-sentences on the tablets of Palenque; and the interpretation of each doubtless depended for its precision on associated ideas, such as no mere philological investigations could enable us to recover. A single

"1

illustration of this will suffice. On the wall of the temple of Philæe, at the first cataract of the Nile, the ram-headed god Kneph is represented seated, and at work on a potter's wheel, with a group of hieroglyphics over his head, which have been thus translated. Mr. George R. Gliddon, adopting the version of Dr. W. C. Taylor, reads thus: "Knum 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." Mr. Birch of the British Museum furnishes this very different reading of the same hieroglyphic inscription : "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."2 Without the pictorial symbol of the divine ram-headed potter, significant to all eyes, it may be doubted if the two readings would have even presented such slight correspondence as they do. It is not, therefore, without reason that Prescott, after commenting on the Palenque writing as exhibiting an advanced stage of the art, with little indications of anything more than the common elements of such writing to connect it with Egyptian hieroglyphics, adds: "That its mysterious import will ever be deciphered is scarcely to be expected. The language of the race who employed it, the race itself, is unknown. And it is not likely that another Rosetta Stone will be found with its trilingual inscription to supply the means of comparison, and to guide the American Champollion in the path of discovery."

1 Ancient Egypt, 12th Edition, p. 28.

2 Arundale and Bonomi's Antiquities, British Museum, p. 13.

Among the examples of ancient picture-writing illustrated in Lord Kingsborough's elaborate work on Mexican antiquities, the most curious of all is the Dresden codex, to which Prescott directs special attention as bearing scarcely any traces of a common origin with the highly coloured and fantastic picturings of the Aztec manuscripts. The figures of objects, though delicately drawn, frequently consist of arbitrary or nondescript designs, and as Prescott says, "are possibly phonetic. Their

regular arrangement is quite equal to the Egyptian. The whole infers a much higher civilisation than the Aztec, and offers abundant food for curious speculation." Many of them are, indeed, pictorial representations accompanied by hieroglyphic characters arranged in lines, as though constituting a written commentary or description accompanied with numerical notation, and certainly suggest a resemblance to the Palenque hieroglyphics which is totally wanting in the Mexican paintings. Nor is there any improbability in the supposition that the