The wide diffusion of this imitative faculty and feeling for form was no doubt stimulated by its employment for representative and symbolic purposes. The relation of imitative drawing to written language is equally manifest in the graven records of the Nile valley and the analogous inscriptions of Yucatan or Peru. Quipus, wampum, and all other mnemonic systems, dependent on the transmission of images and ideas from one generation to another, literally, by word of mouth, have within themselves no such germ of higher development as the picture-writing or sculpturing of the early Egyptians, from which all the alphabets of Europe have been evolved. The phonetic signs, inherited by us directly from the Romans, seem so simple, and yet are of such priceless value in their application, that it seems natural to think of the letters of Cadmus as a gift not less wonderful than speech; since, by their instrumentality, the wise of all ages speak to us still. Plutarch tells, in his _De Iside et Osiride_, that when Thoth, the god of letters, first appeared on the earth, the inhabitants of Egypt had no language, but only uttered the cries of animals. They had, at least, no language with which to speak to other generations; nor any common speech to supersede the confusion of tongues which characterised their great river valley, bordering on Asia, and forming the highway from Ethiopia to the Mediterranean Sea. The light thrown for us on the climate, the fauna, the people, and the whole social life of Europe’s Palæolithic era, by a few graphic delineations of its primitive artists, suffices to show how the northern Thoth may have manifested his advent among them. The condition of the Indian tribes in the North-West, in British Columbia, and in the territories of the United States, abundantly illustrates the effect of a multiplicity of languages among nomad savages. The Blackfeet are in reality a political and not an ethnical confederation, with at least three distinct languages, and numerous dialects spoken among their dispersed tribes. The same condition is found among the Kiawakaskaia Indians, beyond the Rocky Mountains. In the confluence of the nomad hunters to common centres of trade, speech accordingly fails them for all purposes of intercommunication; and travellers and fur-traders have long been familiar with the growth of a common language at more than one of the chief meeting-places of diverse tribes and races on the Pacific coast. The Clatsop, in so far as it is native, is a dialect of the Cowlitz language; but, as now in use, it is one of the jargons or “trade languages” of the Pacific. But Fort Vancouver, long one of the largest trading-posts of the Hudson Bay Company, has been the special Babel where, out of the strangest confusion of tongues, a new language has been evolved.