By an alphabet, strictly so called, we understand a series of symbols which have become the conventional equivalents to the eye of the sounds which combine to form the speech of a people. But _alpha_, _beta_, etc., were undoubtedly, in their first stage, pictures, and not arbitrary signs; though they passed undesignedly into the demotic characters of the Egyptian current hand, and were then transformed, from ideographic and syllabic characters, into the true phonetics out of which have come the later alphabets of the civilised world. Egypt is justly credited with the origination of a system of writing which lies at the foundation of all our inherited knowledge, and which, as Bacon says, “makes ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations and inventions, the one of the other.” Yet the germ of all this lay in the graphic records of the palæolithic cave-men; and the very same process of evolution from pure pictorial representation to picture-writing or ideography, and so to arbitrary hieroglyphic signs, or word-writing, is seen in the graven records of Copan or Palenque, and on the ancient monuments of the Nile. It is replete with interest thus to turn aside from the Old World, with all its wealth of intellectual progress associated with the letters of Cadmus, and find that in the western hemisphere the human mind has followed the very same path in its struggle towards the light. Longfellow, in his “Song of Hiawatha,” has interwoven Algonkin and Iroquois legends into a national epic, in which the elements of Indian progress are all traced to this mythic benefactor, subsequently identified by Mr. Horatio Hale, in his _Book of Iroquois Rites_, with a wise Onondaga chief of the fifteenth century. But, tracing in legendary fashion the early steps of Indian progress, the poet represents the mythic reformer mourning how all things perish and pass into oblivion. Even the great achievements and the traditions of their people fade away from the memory of the old men. And so he inaugurates the method of recording events, which in reality we recognise as the natural product of the human mind in the exercise of that imitative faculty which the discoveries of comparatively recent years have revealed to us as in full activity among the men of Europe’s remote Post-Glacial era. With his paints of diverse colours he depicts on the smooth birch-bark simple figures and symbols, such as are to be seen graven on hundreds of rocks throughout the North American continent, and are in constant use by the Indian in chronicling his own deeds on his buffalo robe, or recording those of the deceased chief on his grave-post. The result is a simple process of picture-writing, readily translatable, with nearly equal facility, into the language of every tribe. Deeds of daring against Indians or white men are set forth by the native chronicler, and the rivals are clearly indicated by means of their characteristic costume and weapons.