The Red Indians of North America have invented some very ingenious methods of picturing time and numbers. They have names for the thirteen moons or months into which they divide the year--Whirlwind moon, moon when the leaves fall off, moon when the fowls go to the south, etc., and when a hunter setting forth on a long expedition wished to leave a record of the time of his departure for a friend who should follow him on the same track, he carved on the bark of a tree a picture of the name of the moon, accompanied with such an exact representation of the state of the moon in the heavens on the night when he set out, that his friends had no difficulty in reading the date correctly. The Indians of Virginia kept a record of events in the form of a series of wheels of sixty spokes, each wheel representing the life of a man, sixty years being the average life of a man among the Indians. The spokes meant years, and on each one a picture of the principal occurrences of the year was drawn. A missionary who accompanied Penn to Pennsylvania says that he saw a wheel, on one spoke of which the first arrival of Europeans in America was recorded. The history of this disastrous event for the Indians was given by a picture of a white swan spitting fire from its mouth. The swan, being a water-bird, told that the strangers came over the sea, its white plumage recalled the colour of their faces, and fire issuing from its mouth represented fire-arms, the possession of which had made them conquerors. The North American Indians also use rude little pictures, rough writing we may call it, to help them to remember songs and charms. Each verse of a song is concentrated into a little picture, the sight of which recalls the words to one who has once learned it. A drawing of a little man, with four marks on his legs and two on his breast, recalls the adverse charm, ‘Two days must you fast, my friend, four days must you sit still.’ A picture of a circle with a figure in the middle represents a verse of a love-song, and says to the initiated, ‘Were she on a distant island I could make her swim over.’ This sort of picturing seems to be very _near_ writing, for it serves to recall words--but still only to recall them--it would not suggest the words to those who had never heard the song before; it is only an aid to memory, and its employers have only as yet taken the first step in the great discovery we are speaking of. The Mexicans, though they had attained to much greater skill than this in the drawing and colouring of pictures, had not progressed much further in the invention. Their picture-scrolls do not seem ever to have been more than an elaborate system of mnemonics, which, hardly less than the Peruvian quipus, required a race of interpreters to hand down their meaning from one generation to another. This fact makes us regret somewhat less keenly the decision of the first Spanish archbishop sent to Mexico, who, on being informed of the great