It doubtless will be a still greater surprise to the reader to be told that there are yet retained in our language not a few of the primitive pictures that antedate writing, al tered and modified, to be sure, through ages of use, dur ing which interval they have become greatly simplified and conventionalized. All written languages contain these silent witnesses of their pictorial origin, existing like the persistence of ancestral traits in individual tribes; or to be nearer our point, like the roots of their spoken words converging different dialects back to a common linguistic parent.