The simplest and presumably earliest form of outward record is the pictorial object record i.e. an object “in which a picture of the thing is given, whereby at a glance it tells its own story” as Clodd (p. 35) says of the corresponding image signs which form what is commonly thought of as “picture writing”. These pictorial objects are distinguished from mnemonic objects (quipu, abacus, etc.) as pictographic image writing is from ideographic and phonetic writing, by the fact that in themselves they suggest somehow the things meant while mnemonic objects or images require previous agreement or explanation.

The pictorial objects used for writing may be whole objects or parts of objects and they may stand for individuals or for classes of things, e.g. a goat’s head may stand for a certain wild goat killed on a certain hunting trip or, with numbers attached, it may stand for a herd of domestic goats.

The earliest records were no doubt whole object records of individuals. When the hunter first brought home his quarry this had in it most of the essential elements of handwriting (those left behind could read in it the record of the trip) and when he brought useless quarry, simply to show his prowess, it had in it all the elements of the record, as has in fact the bringing by a dog of a woodchuck to his master or the bringing home by a modern boy of a uneatable string of fish to “show”. The bringing home from war of living captives to be slain, or dead bodies to be hung from the ship’s prow or nailed on the city gates, has the same motive and the same record character. So too the hanging of criminals on gibbets has the character both of the record-book and the instruction book. In these cases the very object itself is kept and exhibited—the whole object (though without life). Perhaps the nearest approach to the whole object library, in the sense of a permanent collection of records, was when all the permanent spoils of a campaign were “devoted” or “laid up” and kept together for memorial rather than economic purposes in the treasury of the temple.

A strict modern illustration of this case is a collection of battle flags taken or carried in a certain war, campaign or battle. Or again if a modern hunter should have all the spoils of a certain hunt stuffed and mounted as a record of the hunt, this would be of the same nature—a whole object record collection with an object to stand for every individual.

The sample or specimen whole object record as distinguished from the individual record is in modern times extensively known and used in the sale of goods by travelling salesmen. In its rudiments as a means of visible communication of ideas it was doubtless as old and perhaps older even than the keeping of trophies for record. If e.g. man was herbivorous before he was carnivorous then doubtless primitive man scouting for food would bring back specimens for his family just as a modern boy may bring in specimens of the wild grapes or berries that he has found for information of the folks at home. The best modern illustration of the sample or specimen whole object is in museums, menageries, zoological and botanical gardens, and the like, where specimens of various kinds of objects are gathered to stand for classes, without any special regard to the number in the class.

Museums in general illustrate object record. The historical museums generally and collections of historical relics large and small, together with mineral, plant or animal collections of rare objects, otherwise unknown, or species otherwise extinct (e.g. the American bison) are of the nature of individual whole object records, while all museums come so close to the idea of the library, either in the matter of record or in the purpose of message or information, that one is tempted to describe museums as rudimentary libraries, and libraries as more complex museums. Art museums are in this aspect a sort of transition between the museum proper or whole object library and the library proper or the image-symbol-record collection.

Whole object record is, however, evidently cumbersome, and man, observing this, early learned a fact very significant for the history of handwriting i.e. that for record, reminder, or information, a part of an object may serve just as well as a whole object. This principle of the abbreviation of signs for the sake of economy is perhaps the most striking and consistent principle in the whole history of handwriting. It is the principle which led not only from the whole to the part and sample but from the part object to the mnemonic object, from object to image, from image to ideogram, and which prevails throughout the whole farther development of phonetic handwriting, during which picture phonetic signs became more and more conventionalized, through syllabic writing into alphabetic, and it is the law which has produced the numerous variations in the numberless historical alphabets, issuing also finally in numberless systems of stenography. This abbreviation is very early found in war trophies and in hunting trophies. In war it was found that the heads, hands, ears or scalps of enemies or even the left hand or right hand or ear, as conventionally agreed upon, was just as good an evidence of prowess and much more transportable than whole bodies—and Borneo and Filipino head hunters and American Indian scalpers have practised this discovery in very recent times.

In the case of hunting trophies the history was the same. Actual bodies brought back from a hunting trip were not altogether a permanent record, but after the tribal feast or sacrifice (commonly perhaps in earliest times both in one) the head and skin remained and formed a potentially more permanent record. Even in modern times such skins may be kept as wholes—stuffed for museum purposes or as hunting trophies, and they are, indeed, often mounted as rugs with both head and tail attached. In this stage they form what may be still counted as whole object records but from this stage object abbreviation followed as rapidly as in war trophies. If the skin was separated from head and horns for economic reasons, either was found to serve the purposes of record. A man’s collection of pelts e.g. is obviously a collection of hunting records as well as a collection of wealth. The Egyptian determinative for quadruped is, as a matter of fact, the picture not of a whole animal but of a skin with tail and without head. On the other hand, head and horns served equally as well for record as skin and tail, whether the purpose was a mere record of exploits or a record of sacrifices. This precise stage is amply represented in the modern hunting lodge with its heads of moose or other animals, and it is possible that the expression so many “head of cattle” is a relic of this stage.

In each of these cases the principle of the characteristic part obtains i.e. the abbreviation is not beyond the point where the object can be recognized at sight as standing for a certain animal.

The principle of the characteristic part once established, the tendency to abbreviation for the sake of economy in transportation, storage, or exhibition, led rapidly to the use of the very simplest unmistakable part showing the individual and then to the simplest unmistakable part showing kind. In the case of war-trophies head was reduced to scalp, and this was conventionalized again so that the trophy scalp consisted of a very small portion from a particular point on the head. In the case of hunting trophies, the head was reduced to perhaps ears or horns, tusks or teeth. The process is found definitely illustrated in the Cretan history in the reduction of the ox’s head to simple horns in ritual use, and vestiges of this are probably also to be found in the symbolic use of horns on altars, horns on men as a symbol of power, and the like. On the other hand the skin and tail separated from the horns followed the same law of progressive economy and was reduced perhaps to the tail only (the fox’s brush) or the claws (the primitive claw necklaces).

The modern bounty on wolf scalps contains the whole principle of characteristic part abbreviation up to this point in a nutshell. It is the smallest unmistakable readily recognized and nonduplicable part. It is important for individual record that it should not be possible to collect two bounties on one wolf or to boast of two fish caught or two dead enemies, where there has been but one.

It is thus not fancy or jest to say the scalp belt of an American Indian chief (albeit this did not play such a part in the Indian world as is commonly imagined), or the tiger-tooth necklace of the African chief, is a collection of records representing a rather advanced stage of evolution.

Abbreviations in the case of sample records may be carried one step farther still, for a single eagle’s feather or a very small piece of fur shows kind just as well as a head or tail or a whole skin.

Perhaps the best examples of collections of record objects in the most abbreviated forms are, for individual records, the collections of trophies worn on the person, and for specimen records the medicine bag of West Africa.

Individual trophy collections are common to all primitive peoples and everywhere tended towards abbreviated trophies which could be worn. It would be more than rash to trace the use of clothing and all personal adornment to the wearing of trophies as there is some slight temptation to do, but trophy necklaces, feather bonnets, and the like, were certainly worn in many tribes and without very much other clothing, either of protective or ornamental character. The leopard’s tooth necklace of the African chief, recording the number of leopards slain by his tribe, and the feather bonnet of the American Indian, are true record collections. In general all objects of personal adornment among primitive peoples are symbolic, that is, they have meaning and are of the nature of writing. They are kept for record rather than as objects of beauty or for the enhancement of personal beauty. Labrets, for example, are a sign of aristocratic birth, and even if the objects worn are ritual rather than trophy in character, still each one has its symbolic meaning, and the expert may read in each collection a tale of events or of specific religious ideas almost as clearly as in the phonetic words of a printed book.

The West African medicine bag, like other medicine bags, contained a collection of so called fetish objects of all sorts—bits of fur, feathers, claws, hair, twigs, bark, etc., etc.—but the use of these objects was not for medicine or magical purposes as commonly understood. They formed obviously an object record collection quite in the nature of a collection of books. As each object was drawn out of the bag, the keeper of the bag recited some appropriate tale or formula for which the object stood.

This probably casts light on many other so-called fetish collections of primitive people, as for example those of the North American Indians. “Mooney says, in describing the fetish, that it may be a bone, a feather, a carved or painted stick, a stone arrowhead, a curious fossil or concretion, a tuft of hair, a necklace of red berries, the stuffed skin of a lizard, the dried hand of an enemy, a small bag of pounded charcoal mixed with human blood—anything, in fact ... no matter how uncouth or unaccountable, provided it be easily portable and attachable. The fetish might be ... even a trophy taken from a slain enemy, or a bird, animal, or reptile.” (Hodge. HandbAmInd 1:458.)

These fetishes might be kept in the medicine sack (the Chippewa pindikosan) or “It might be fastened to the scalp-lock as a pendant, attached to some part of the dress, hung from the bridle bit, concealed between the covers of a shield, or guarded in a special repository in the dwelling. Mothers sometimes tied the fetish to the child’s cradle.” (Hodge. HandbAmInd 1:458.)

These fetishes represent not only events but ideas (a vision, a dream, a thought, or an action). They represent not only religious and mythological ideas and tribal records, but individual exploits in war or hunting and other individual records. In short, the medicine bag the world over is a collection of recorded ideas, both of historical and mythological character if not also of an economic character.

So far as the “fetish” objects are not trophy objects, but stand for ideas, they form a transition to the mnemonic object, but so long as the object is such as to suggest to the keeper and expounder the idea of the particular form of words or ideas which he relates, it is still to be counted as object rather than mnemonic writing e.g. if a bit of fox fur suggests a story of a fox, it is still to be counted a pictorial object rather than a mnemonic object.

If twenty eagle feathers, e.g. stand for twenty eagles, or twenty small bits of fur for twenty reindeer, these sample objects are still used pictorially, but if a feather head-dress is made of eagle’s feathers, each feather symbolizing some particular exploit, the matter has passed over from the pictorial to the mnemonic stage.