This is necessary to be borne in mind, because there is a certain use of pictorial and symbolic signs which is in danger of being confounded with the perfect hieroglyph; and we are inclined to think this confusion has been made with regard to some of the sculptured remains discovered in Central America. We doubt if these “hieroglyphics,” which scholars are invited to study and to interpret, are hieroglyphics as the word is understood by the Egyptologist. Granting that they always have a meaning, and are not introduced, in some cases, as mere ornaments (just as we introduce the heads of stags or the figures of little children on any vase we desire to ornament), still it may be a meaning of that kind which could be only intelligible to one who from other sources knew the history or the fable it was intended to bring to remembrance. A representation of this kind, half pictorial and half symbolic, would help to keep alive the memory of an event; but, the memory of it once extinct, it could not revive the knowledge of the event to us. We should waste our ingenuity in vain attempts to _read_ what was not, in fact, any kind of _writing_. The Peruvians had manifestly not advanced beyond a system of mnemonics, a kind of _memoria technica_. With certain knots in strings of different colours they had associated certain ideas. A Peruvian woman could show you a bundle of knotted strings and tell you her whole life “was there.” To her it was, but to no one else. If all the Peruvians agreed to associate the history of Peru with other bundles of knotted cords, their _quipus_ would still be only an aid to memory; the history itself must be conveyed from one mind to another by oral communication. Some of the North American Indians had their _wampum_, their many-coloured belt, into which _they talked their treaty_, or any other matter it was desirable to remember. The Mexicans had mingled symbols with their picture-writing, but they had not wrought the hieroglyphic into a system, by means of which alone ideas could be conveyed from one generation to another. With them it could not be said that the art of writing was known. But antiquarians have formed, it seems, a different opinion of the mixture of symbol and picture discovered in the ruins of Copan and Palenque; and, partly on this ground, they arrived at the conclusion that these cities were built and inhabited by a people in advance of the Mexicans or Aztecs discovered by the Spaniards. Mr Wilson says very distinctly of those mysterious sculptures: “They are no rude 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.”