594 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



aboriginal skill. The series of lines and dots are regular, and the 

 faintly outlined snake's tongue is true to nature ; as is also the 

 end of the object, which represents with marked fidelity the rattle 

 of the rattlesnake. The Indian who could make this carving had 

 a wide range of capabilities in the line of artistic representation. 

 And now a word, in conclusion, with reference to pictorial repre- 

 sentation, where many objects, and these in action, are concerned. 

 We know how, in recent times, the Western Indian depicted with 

 spirit a fight with other Indians or a buffalo-hunt. If, then, in 

 prehistoric time and at the time of the continent being first 

 peopled with Europeans, our Delaware Indian was capable of 

 such artistic efforts as have been briefly commented upon in the 

 preceding pages, might he not likewise have essayed in this direc- 

 tion also, and recorded events by the grouping of men and ani- 

 mals on slabs of stone ? The pictured rocks on the Susquehanna 

 show a disposition to accomplish this on a large scale ; but I refer 

 more particularly to ornament gorgets. It is scarcely safe, and 

 certainly not logical, to decry such specimens, however startling 

 the subject treated or artistically accomplished. Perhaps through 

 some such pictured stone we may yet learn that the Indian was 

 present when the last mastodon and giant elk in the valley of the 

 Delaware bit the dust. 



THE DECLINE OF BIBLIOLATRY.* 



By Pkof. T. II. HUXLEY. 



MY memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth dec- 

 ade of the nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood 

 had a little abated and the tops of certain mountains were 

 soon to appear, chiefly in the neighborhood of Oxford ; but 

 when, nevertheless, bibliolatry was rampant ; when church and 

 chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God, the crude assump- 

 tions of the worst informed and, in natural sequence, the most 

 presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools. 



In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly 

 without my authorization, I was very early taken to hear " ser- 

 mons in the vulgar tongue." And vulgar enough often was the 

 tongue in which some preacher, ignorant alike of literature, of 

 history, of science, and even of theology, outside that patron- 

 ized by his own narrow school, poured forth, from the safe 

 intrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against those who devi- 

 ated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to 



* From the Prologue to Essays upon some Controverted Questions, by T. H. Huxley, 

 F. R. S. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 1892. 



