Mazarin. The portraiture of a fish, used, especially by the early
Christians, for the name and title of Jesus Christ was still
more accidental, being, in the Greek word [Greek: ichthus], an
acrostic composed of the initials of the several Greek words
signifying that name and title. This origin being unknown to persons
whose religious enthusiasm was as usual in direct proportion to their
ignorance, they expended much rhetoric to prove that there was some
true symbolic relation between an actual fish and the Saviour of men.
Apart from this misapplication, the fish undoubtedly became an emblem
of Christ and of Christianity, appearing frequently on the Roman
catacombs and at one time it was used hermeneutically.

The several tribal signs for the Sioux, Arapahos, Cheyennes, &c.,
are their emblems precisely as the star-spangled flag is that of the
United States, but there is nothing symbolic in any of them. So the
signs for individual chiefs, when not merely translations of their
names, are emblematic of their family totems or personal distinctions,
and are no more symbols than are the distinctive shoulder-straps of
army officers. The _crux ansata_ and the circle formed by a snake
biting its tail are symbols, but _consensus_ as well as invention
was necessary for their establishment, and the Indians have produced
nothing so esoteric, nothing which they intended for hermeneutic as
distinct from descriptive or mnemonic purposes. Sign language can
undoubtedly be and is employed to express highly metaphysical ideas,
but to do that in a symbolic system requires a development of the
mode of expression consequent upon a similar development of the mental
idiocrasy of the gesturers far beyond any yet found among historic
tribes north of Mexico. A very few of their signs may at first appear
to be symbolic, yet even those on closer examination will probably be
relegated to the class of emblems.

The point urged is that while many signs can be used as emblems and
both can be converted by convention into symbols or be explained as
such by perverted ingenuity, it is futile to seek for that form of
psychologic exuberance in the stage of development attained by the
tribes now under consideration. All predetermination to interpret
either their signs or their pictographs on the principles of symbolism
as understood or pretended to be understood by its admirers, and
as are sometimes properly applied to Egyptian hieroglyphs, results
in mooni