1896.] 4-1 4 [Gushing. 



In the second place, all of the main outlines of this primitive painting, 

 — the crest, neck, breast, shoulder, and oblique end of the tail, were 

 delicately spaced, so as to produce the eflfect of double outlining and 

 so as to enhance botli the beauty and the perspective of the figure. The 

 centres of the circlets falling from the open beak were filled with- 

 pigment — originally blue, white, and probably red, — and a tongue-like 

 line of white extended from the moutli to the circlets and was oppositely 

 continued in black, into the throat of the figure — enabling me to identify 

 it as the heart-line, and these circlets as "living," or "sounding" 

 breaths or Avords — symbolizing the "commands of the four quarters." 

 The animal represented under the talons of the bird figure, had a long 

 and faintly ringed tail, which extended nearly to the lower paddle- 

 blade, and enabled me to identify it, in turn, as a picture of the 

 raccoon — all as more fully described on pp. 384 and 385 of tlie text. 



Fig. 2 represents one of those mysterious objects described on pp. 

 382 to 385 inclusive, as "altar-", or "ancestral-tablets." It was painted 

 on botli sides, — in black and white on the side here shown, and with 

 four round marks of white enclosed and dotted in black, centrally and 

 equidistantly disposed along the other side. It was made of light wood, 

 — pine or cypress, — was two feet three and a half inches high, ten inches 

 ,wide, flat, and an incli thick below the shoulders, and nearly three inches 

 thick in the middle of convex shovel-shaped head or nose. It seems to- 

 be the highly conventionalized representation, as does the little amulet 

 of coral lime-stone below (Fig. 3, which is barely two inches long, by 

 one and a quarter inches wide), of some kind of monster of the deep — 

 like the alligator, or cayman or American crocodile. 



Fig. 4 represents the painted valve of a pair of sun-shells described on 

 pp. 886 and 387 ; and compared as to details on pp. 393, 394 and 402, as 

 well as in Plate XXXV, with corresponding mound builder delineations. 

 They were found tightly closed together, and near some symbolic head- 

 slats, on which a bird-god (like tlie one just described) had been painted,. 

 — in section 30 (Plate XXXI), by Messrs. Gause and Bergmann. 



Fig. 6 represents a beautifi;l little pestle and bowl of mastich-wood 

 found together as here shown, although tilted over — in section 40 — by 

 Alfred Hudson. The pestle was six and a half inches high ; the bowl, 

 three and a quarter inches in diameter. Both were handsomely polished 

 and were reticularly decorated with incised lines, so delicate as to al- 

 most escape detection. 



fisher,— who were probably bird-gods of war,— came to be imitated (reproduced, so far as 

 possible) in the head-dress (or aspect) of the Warrior— the Wrathful Defender of his Peo- 

 ple and their Homes." 



I quote this passage, which was later substantially published in the ^Iwimcan Anthro- 

 pologist (vol. X, pp. 17 and 18), because I think it throws light on the meaning of the 

 tablet here described and figured, not only as being really a painting of the Bird-God of 

 War of the ancient key dwellers, but also, because of its apparent bearing on probable 

 historic or derivative connections of the Southern Indians with a key dweller people or 

 ancestry. 



PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXV. 153. 3 B. PRINTED AUG. 10, 1897. 



