Fig. 32 supplies a striking example of the cumbersomeness of the pictograph as contrasted with the sound-symbol. It is a copy of a record which an Innuit placed over the door of his dwelling to notify to his friends that he had gone on a journey. The persons thus notified are indicated in 1, 3, 5, 7; 2 is the speaker, who denotes the direction in which he is leaving by his extended left hand; 4 is the gesture sign for "many," and 6 for sleep, the upraising of the left hand showing that he will be some distance away; 8, his intended return is denoted by the right hand being pointed homeward, while the left arm is bent to denote return. (_c_) _The Ideographic Stage._--As the characters pass from the pictorial to the emblematic or the symbolic, their meaning, obviously, becomes more obscure, save to the initiated. "They do not," as Colonel Mallery remarks, "depict, but suggest objects; do not speak directly through the eye to the intelligence, but presuppose in the mind knowledge of an event or fact which the sign recalls. The symbols of the ark, dove, olive-branch, and rainbow would be wholly meaningless to people unfamiliar with the Mosaic or some similar cosmology, as would be the cross and the crescent to those ignorant of history." And even in pictography, as the same excellent authority observes, "it is very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between historical and traditional accounts obtained from Indians. The winter counts (_i.e._ the reckoning of time by winters, and the applying of names instead of numbers to them, as, _e.g._, 'catching-wild-horses winter,' the device for which was a lasso), while having their chief value as calendars, contain some material that is absolute and verifiable tribal history." The difficulties of interpretation, as the examples given evidence, are in the larger number being "merely mnemonic records, and treated in connection with material objects formerly, and perhaps still, used mnemonically." (Mallery, "On the Pictographs of the North American Indians," _Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, 1886.) The signs of advance from the pictorial to the ideographic stage which are to be noted among the Red Indians, are more sharply marked in the hieroglyphs and phonetic characters on the stone monuments and manuscripts found among the relics of the vanished peoples of Mexico and Yucatan.