The earliest existing picture writing of the Stone Age includes many images of domestic animals in the caves of the Pyrenees with apparently conventional signs sometimes accompanying them. Prehistoric picture writing in the Mediterranean regions includes also pottery marks, figures of animals or parts of animals used to distinguish ships and having their modern counterpart in the ship’s figurehead, also the seals, milk-stones of Crete, the rock carvings of Liguria and the like. The very first beginnings of picture writing are perhaps to be found in natural object images. The Chinese ascribed the origin of their written characters to bird tracks, and many primitive peoples used stones which accidentally resembled animals as images of them. Perhaps the most natural and earliest reading of records is the reading of footprints of hunted birds and animals. From these tracks the expert woodsman may read the kind and number of individuals passing, the direction that they are taking, and many other details. This fact is familiar with all hunting, and it is famous in the trailing of both men and animals by American Indians and by primitive people generally. The method is still much used in the tracking of criminals by footprints, and more especially and scientifically in these days by finger-print records. These records are actual images of parts of individuals, and it is not incredible, even if not evidenced, that the earliest use of writing by the Chinese should have been the imitation of birds’ tracks in clay by some hunter in order to describe the kind of birds that he had seen. It has been mentioned at various points in this paper that the record of number is near, if not at, the beginning of permanent records, and Gow, in his History of Greek mathematics, has a theory that the record of numbers above ten began by impressing the ten fingers in the moist earth. [Illustration: RECORD ORNAMENT OF IMITATION LEOPARD TEETH FROM FROBENIUS. CHILDHOOD OF MAN, p. 27 ] Another very early form was the natural rock having some accidental resemblance to bird or beast, or else formed by very slight chipping of a natural image, as in some cases in the Pyrenean caves. Various American Indian tribes used natural fossils or accidental images in this way. The transition from a slight chipping to sculpture is, of course, an easy one. Perhaps the simplest and most natural transition from pictorial object to image writing is suggested by the trophy records of an African chief as described by Frobenius. The actual record trophies of leopard hunting—the leopard’s teeth—are taken and worn in a necklace by the chief and form a tribal record. The individual making the killing has, however, a wooden model of the tooth which he wears as an individual trophy. This very simple and natural proceeding has in it the germ of picture writing,—is indeed picture writing.