PREHISTORIC ART IN AMERICA. 823 



Pictographs to which we are disposed to accord a great antiquity 

 are to be seen on the sides of caves in Nicaragua. Some grottoes in 

 the mountains of Oajaca also bear witness to the labor of man, in the 

 shape of coarse paintings in red ochre. Among them is frequently re- 

 peated the imprint in black of a human hand. This imprint, which is 

 probably borrowed from some myth, seems to have played a great 

 part in America. It is found reproduced in regions very remote from 

 one another, standing out on the potteries, sometimes in red on a black 

 ground, sometimes in black on a red ground. In our own days it is 

 occasionally found in use among Indians as a totem or coat-of-arms. 



All that we have just said bears witness to a still primitive condi- 

 tion of art. The men who executed the works, barbarous as they seem 

 to have been, were capable of rising higher. This is proved by works 

 of a manifestly later epoch. Guatemala, the ancient land of the 

 Quiches and the Cakchiquels, abounds in ruins. Bas-reliefs, statues, 

 and monoliths covered with arabesques to the height of twenty feet, 

 meet the traveler frequently. At Quirigua, a small port on the Bay 

 of Honduras, a statue of a woman has been found, footless and hand- 

 less, with a crowned idol on its head ; excavations by the side of it 

 have brought to light a tiger's head in porphyry. At Santa Lucia 

 Cosumalhuapa, at the foot of the Volcan de Fuego, among the Cyclo- 

 pean stones and the statues of tapirs and caymans, lie colossal stone 

 heads, of a strange type, hitherto unknown. Two of these heads wear 

 the immense ear-rings peculiar to the ancient Peruvians, and a head- 

 dress similar to the Asiatic turbans. Farther on are bas-reliefs in hard 

 porphyry, larger than nature, representing personages as odd in con- 

 ception as in execution, and mythological scenes that have no relation 

 to any known form of worship. The most interesting bas-relief rep- 

 resents a human sacrifice. The principal personage is a priest ; he is 

 naked and, according to the custom of the Aztec priests, wears a garter 

 around his left leg ; only the left foot is shod. The head-dress is a 

 crab. One hand holds a flint, doubtless the sacrificial knife, while the 

 other hand grasps the head of the victim to be slain. On a second 

 plane, two acolytes are carrying human heads. One of them is a 

 skeleton, a sinister symbol of death. Its head is of a simian shape, 

 mingling the grotesque with the terrible. To cite more similar facts 

 would merely involve unpleasant repetitions. We shall only add, then, 

 that the figures are of a grinning aspect and a repulsive ugliness. The 

 ancient American races did not seek for the beautiful, or, rather, did 

 not comprehend it as we do, who have been taught by the immortal 

 creators of the high art of Greece. 



We have just occasion to be surprised when we think of the time 

 that was required to execute these works, and consider what inefficient 

 mechanical means the artists had to use. They had to detach blocks 

 of hard stone by means of wretched tools of quartzite and obsidian, 

 and to saw granite and porphyry with agave-fibers and emery. A 



