savage will make picture-marks on a stone or a bone or a bit of wood; they
serve to recall to him and his companions certain events which appeared
remarkable or important for one or another reason; there was an
earthquake, or a battle, or a famine, or an invasion: the chronicler
himself, or some fellow-tribesman of his, may have performed some notable
exploit. The impulse to make a record of it was natural: posterity might
thereby be informed, after the chronicler himself had passed away,
concerning the perils, the valor, the strange experiences of their
ancestors. Such records were uniformly brief, and no attempt was made to
connect one with another, or to interpret them. We find such fragmentary
histories among the remains of our own aborigines; and the inscriptions of
Egypt and Mesopotamia are the same in character and intention, though more
elaborate. Warlike kings thus endeavored, from motives of pride, to
perpetuate the memory of their achievements. At the time when they were
inscribed upon the rock, or the walls of the tombs, or the pedestals of
the statues, they had no further value than this. But after the lapse of
many ages, they acquire a new value, far greater than the original one,
and not contemplated by the scribes. They assume their proper place in the
long story of mankind, and indicate, each in its degree, the manner and
direction of the processes by which man has become what he is, from what
he was. Thereby there is breathed into the dead fact the breath of life;
it rises from its tomb of centuries, and does its appointed work in the
mighty organism of humanity.

In a more complex state of society, a class of persons comes into being
who are neither protagonists, nor slaves, but observers; and they meditate
on events, and seek to fathom their meaning. If the observer be
imaginative, the picturesque side of things appeals to him; he dissolves
the facts, and recreates them to suit his conceptions of beauty and
harmony; and we have poetry and legend. Another type of mind will give us