CnshiDg.] 4:14: [Nov. 6, 



inheritance therefrom, that all the great southern tribes encountered by 

 De Soto and his successors, were ruled over by the most powerful chiefs 

 we know of, outside of Mexico, Peru and Central America, anywhere 

 on this continent ; namely, the Mikos or King-chiefs, who had actual 

 power of life and death over nearly all — save members of the priest- 

 hood — among their subjects, and were held to be of divine descent. 



This abnormally high development in government, indicated by 

 great public works on the keys and among the mounds, and in a meas- 

 ure by historic records, is, as we have seen, paralleled in the arts of the 

 keys, for in them we found, along with an exceedingly high growth of 

 the conventional side of art, an artistic freedom on the aesthetic side 

 that I have not seen equaled in any of the primitive remains of this con- 

 tinent, elsewhere, save alone perhaps, in those of Central America. 

 This gives good ground for another generalization ; that while the 

 desert of the land, with its scant vegetation andscanter animal life, leads 

 naturally, yet through the technique involved, to formal conventional 

 art, the desert of the sea, teeming with growth and quick with animal 

 life in untold variety, beauty and abundance, leads as in this case, 

 and for like reasons, not to formal, but to highly realistic convention- 

 alization. In the one art, that of the land desert, may be found 

 abundant textile and basketry forms of decoration. There, life seems 

 to have been held so dearly that only in angular or geometric style, or 

 by means of pure symbols rather than by direct representation, were 

 animistic qualities attributed to things made ; so that above any other 

 ai"t, the art of the arid desert may be called attributive art. But here in 

 the sea wastes, where life so abounded, X\\g forms, alike of animals and of 

 men, were lavishly, most realistically and gracefully represented, and the 

 commonest tools were shaped over with quite unmistakable life-marks 

 and other added features, and were thus, while conventionally, withal 

 realistically and fearlessly invested, with their animistic and specialistic 

 powers. So, in contrast to the art of the inland desert, this of the sea 

 may be called an art of investure. It seems to me that now possessing 

 as we do examples of these opposite extremes of art (for museums are 

 filled with the one extreme) there is scarcely a primitive kind of art, 

 ancient or modern, which cannot be measurably interpreled l)y com- 

 parative study of the one kind (the conventional and attributive) and 

 the other kind so clearly illustrated by our collection (the realistic and 

 the conventionally investive). In this, then, as in its exemplification 

 of man's direct relationship in cultural and even perhaps in racial devel- 

 opment, to his environment, our study of the ancient kej' remains, takes 

 its place in the general study of the Science of Man. 



I have only to add that the combined archasological data and collec- 

 tions which we gathered from the ancient keys, were together so com- 

 plete (happily because so many perishable objects were preserved intact 

 and in their proper relations) tliat tliey might be called, what though so 

 very ancient, almost literally etlinological, rather than arclueological 



