Among the more primitive forms of picture writing are tattooing and body painting. Tattooing is used among many savage tribes to-day and all over the world. This was known in the most ancient times and is often practised to-day especially by sailors and boys, sometimes quite elaborately. Among the savage tribes it was used for religious, political, and economic purposes. One use was as identification mark. This might be a tribal mark or individual mark, and in either case is very closely connected with the totem idea. In either case it might also be used, and was used, as a property or ownership mark to which the tattoo mark corresponded. This is perhaps linked with the ancient Egyptian tattooing through the tribal mark of the modern Nubian. The war paint of the American Indian is as old as the Stone Age in the Mediterranean and is made most curiously interesting by a considerable number of so called Pintadores still existent. These Pintadores form the earliest known step in the history of printing, for they consist of stamps with which the paint could be applied in various figures after the fashion of the modern rubber stamp. These figures, like the war paint of the American Indians, probably had various symbolic meanings according to the figures and the colors used, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there were libraries of printed books in this Stone Age—if by any chance collections of sample impressions from these stamps were kept for any purpose. At any event, when applied they formed what some people would call a living library. Certain tablets possibly used for a similar purpose have been found also among the North American Indians. Body and face painting naturally preceded tattooing—the latter being simply a method of making the record permanent. The methods may or may not have arisen from the marks made by the pressure of trophy necklaces, bracelets, etc., on the skin, or from being etched by the sun on the unprotected skin of light complexioned tribes. However they may have arisen, these two methods of skin marking are among the very early forms of record, were often used to record exploits or events, and sometimes to record an extraordinary number and variety of matters. It seems also to be established that these body pictures were sometimes intended as copies of trophy necklaces or other ornaments. There are many ways beside skin marks in which the idea of image making might have suggested itself to primitive man, inheriting as he perhaps did from an animal ancestry a strong instinct for imitation—the shadow, reflection in water, actual fossils of animals, the etching of sunburn, the silhouette of a tree or animal against the horizon, natural stone forms, tracks in clay, etc.—but in skin marks, natural or artificial, we see the transition process in actual operation. [Illustration: TUPAI CUPA’S TATTOO MARKS, SHOWING A GROUP OF VARIOUS RECORDS FROM PARSON’S STORY OF NEW ZEALAND, p. 16 ]