The fact that savages, when they took off their detachable ornaments to go to war or for ritual dances and the like, put on paint, suggests possibly that the painted forms are images of the things removed. Primitive picture writing on other materials than human skin is found all over the world. It may be drawn, painted, engraved, chiseled, modeled, moulded, woven or inlaid. The petroglyphs or aboriginal rock carvings (more often engravings) and the paintings are the most typical kinds although perhaps not the most common. Both of these kinds are found all over the world; most famously perhaps among the Australians, the Bushmen and the North American Indians. The use by the North American Indians is said to have reached its highest development among the Kiowa and the Dakota tribes in their calendars. “These calendars are painted on deer, antelope, and buffalo hides, and constituted a chronology of past years. The Dakota calendars have a picture for each year ... while that of the Kiowa has a summer symbol and a winter symbol, with a picture or device representing some noteworthy event” (Hodge). It is said of the petroglyphs that they “record personal achievements and happenings more frequently than tribal histories ... are known often to be the records of the visits of individuals to certain places, signposts to indicate the presence of water or the direction of a trail, to give warning or to convey a message ... and many of them ... [are] connected with myths, rituals, and religious practices” (Hodge). “Sometimes a man painted his robe in accordance with a dream, or pictured upon it a yearly record of his own deeds or of the prominent events of the tribe.” “The horses of warriors were often painted to indicate the dreams of the war experiences of their riders.” [Illustration: PICTURE WRITING. LONE DOG’S WINTER COUNT. SERIES OF VARIOUS RECORDS FROM MALLERY (1882-3) pl. vi ] In the matter of abbreviation it was in image writing as in object writing. It begins with whole object images and passes through various stages of abbreviation until it goes over from the pictorial to the mnemonic stage. In image writing this process has many illustrations running back to the cave drawings where the head or horns of an ox or goat are given instead of the whole animal. This convention was used over the whole Mediterranean region and apparently became the direct ancestor of the Hebrew aleph, the Greek alpha, and our modern English a. The letter a as now used in the alphabet appears to be the end of a long historical process of conventionalizing by which user after user has tried to simplify the strokes required more and more or, as the modern complacent “inventors” of the ancient principles which they now call “efficiency” would say, “reduce the motions required” until the present form has been reached. In image writing too is more clearly seen the development of what may be called sample-and-number abbreviation.