converted Indian who drew them. The fact that Spaniards, possessing
our mode of writing, should have found picture-writing the most
effective means of teaching primitive people speaking an alien
tongue has always appeared to me as most instructive and suggestive.

As the natives suggested this method to their instructors, it is
obvious that it was their habitual mode of memorizing a foreign
language. The possibility that words recorded in native pictography
may belong to an alien tongue, opens out a new field for future
research. A curious result is obtained when Tenoch-Titlan, one of
the ancient names of the capital of Mexico is studied from this
point of view. In the well-known rebus now employed as the arms of
Mexico, the syllables Te and Noch only are actually expressed in
picture-writing by the stone=tetl, from which a cactus=nochtli is
growing. This group is, however, surmounted by an eagle holding a
serpent in its talons and the meaning of this animal group appears
symbolical merely. It may be a curious coincidence that the eagle
holding a serpent in its talons was employed by Mediterranean people
as an emblem of victory and occurs on ancient Greek coins with this
significance, and that the recorded name, Tenochtitlan or "the land
of Tenoch," curiously resembles Tenos, the name of a Greek
heptarchy, founded by seven tribes just as the adjacent town of
Chalco, in Mexico, resembles Chalcis, the town in Euboea, where
Aristoteles died.

On p. 418 and in my discussion of Egyptian hieratic script, I have
pointed out that some signs employed express the sounds of words in
another tongue, that the syllables am and an, for instance, seem
indissolubly and universally linked to pole-star worship and
symbolism. It does not seem unreasonable to endeavor to explain this
by imagining that individuals, wishing, in each case, to teach the
word _Sama_=the revolving heaven _i. e._ the North, to people
speaking different languages, should make a picture of a tree or
boat named am in one tongue, and in another country, draw a spider,
named am, by its inhabitants. In the first country the tree, or
boat, and in the second, the spider, would, in time, become the
symbols of the north, and though different, signify the same thing.