sending a letter, it must be confessed. Knot-records were almost everywhere superseded by other methods of recording events as civilization advanced; but still they continued to be resorted to under special circumstances, and by people who had not the pens of ready writers. Darius made a quipus when he took a thong, and tying sixty knots on it, gave it to the Ionian chiefs, that they might untie a knot every day, and go back to their own land if he had not returned when all the knots were undone. The Scythians, however, who, about the same time, sent a message to Darius, afford us an example of another way of attaching special meanings to certain objects, and thereby giving a peculiar use as aids to memory,--writing letters with objects instead of pen and ink, in fact. Here, however, symbolism comes in, and makes the mnemonics at once prettier and less trustworthy as capable of more than one interpretation. The Scythian ambassadors presented Darius (as Herodotus tells us) with a mouse, a bird, a frog, and an arrow, and the message with which they had been intrusted was that, unless he could hide in the earth like a mouse, or fly in the air like a bird, or swim in water like a frog, he would never escape the arrows of the Scythians. Of this last kind of mnemonic was the bow, too heavy for an ordinary man to bend, which the long-lived Ethiopians sent to Cambyses; and the twelve memorial stones which Joshua was directed to place in the river Jordan, in order that the sons might ask the fathers, and the fathers tell the sons what had happened in that place; and, again, such were the yokes and bonds which Jeremiah put round his neck when he testified against the alliance with Egypt before Zedekiah, and the earthen pot that he broke in the presence of the elders of the people. Signs joined with words and actions to convey a fuller or more exact meaning than words alone could convey. Perhaps we ought hardly to call these last examples helps to memory; they partake more of the nature of pictures, and were used to heighten the effect of words. But we may regard them as a connecting link between the merely mechanical tally, wampum and quipus, and the effort to record ideas we must now consider--picturing. It must, however, always be borne in mind that, though we shall speak of these various methods of making records as stages of progress and development, it is not to be supposed that the later ones immediately, or indeed ever wholly, superseded the first any more than the introduction of bronze and iron did away with the use of flint weapons. The one method subsisted side by side with the other, and survived to quite late times, as we see in such usages as the bearing forth of the fiery cross to summon clansmen to the banner of their chieftain, and the casting down of the knight’s glove as a gage of battle, or, to come down to homely modern instances, the tallies and knots on handkerchiefs that unready writers carry to help their memories even now.