In time, each sign might be employed to express the syllable am in
general and in this way isolated systems of ikonomatic writing would
evolve and, in course of time, native artists would more or less
skilfully produce conventionalized and distinctly characteristic
forms and methods.

At the same time the colonizing race might be employing and
perfecting a totally different form of cursive writing for their own
purposes of registration, etc. For instance: in Athens, where Euclid
held an archonship in 403 B.C. and, during centuries, Pythagorean
philosophers identified "earth with a cube, fire with a pyramid, air
with an octahedron, water with an icosahedron, and _the Sphere of
the Universe_ with a dodecahedron," and also taught that a point
corresponds with the monad, both being indivisible; a line with the
duad, etc., it is obvious that points, lines and geometrical figures
must have been employed for the cursive registration of ideas. In a
state, firmly established on fixed principles of numbers, the
cursive registration of its subdivisions, by means of numbers only,
was rendered possible and in such a community the necessity for
cursive writing would be limited and perhaps be confined to the
registration and identification of individuals, the reports of
quantities of produce, etc.

The facts that the letters of the Greek alphabet possess fixed
numerical values, and that the initial letters only of their tribal
names were inscribed on the shields of Lacedaemonian, Sicyonian and
Messenian warriors, for instance, appear to indicate that, at one
time, each Greek tribal division possessed its cursive mark, a
letter, which may have indicated, at the same time, a numerical
division of the confederacy. To understand such cursive records it
is evident that a knowledge of the numerical basis of the state
would be indispensable and imperative and that this would be
confined to the rulers only. My opinion that the Maya calculiform
hieroglyphs constitute cursive notation relating entirely to the
calendrical and governmental cyclical system and absolutely
unintelligible without a knowledge of this, has already been
partially referred to on pp. 242 and 244. From Mexican manuscripts,
where individuals, by means of a numb