REPRESENTATIONS OF FISHES, AQUATIC MAMMALS, ETC. 



205 



to their artistic bent as well as to their appreciation of the advantages they 

 derived from these denizens of the water. It may not be out of place if I give 

 some account of corresponding productions of the former inhabitants of this 

 country, who seem, however, to have preferred in similar imitations the plastic 

 to the graphic mode of execution, all specimens to which I can refer being either 

 pipes, or simply representations in stone or shell, or clay vessels of a fish-form. 



Pipes. — I am not aware that there is among the many so-called " platform- 

 pipes," exhumed from tumuli in Ohio and other western states, a single one 

 which exhibits a fish as principal object, while such imitations of birds, quadru- 

 peds, and even amphibians, are by no means rare. Many pipes of this descrip- 

 tion, all made of stone, were obtained by Messrs. Squier and Davis, in the course 

 of their exploration of earthworks in Ohio, fi'om mounds witliin an embankment 

 of earth close to the Scioto River, four miles north of Chillicothe. This enclosure, 

 somewhat in the shape of a square with strongly-rounded angles, comprises an 

 area of thirteen acres, over which twenty-three mounds are (or were) scattered 

 without much regularity. It has been called " Mound City," from the great 

 number of mounds within its precinct. In digging into the mounds, the explor- 

 ers discovered in many of them hearths, which furnished a great number of 

 relics ; and from one of the hearths nearly two hundred of the above-mentioned 

 pipes were taken, not all entire, but jiartly cracked by the action of fire, or other- 

 wise damaged. In two of these pipes fishes are represented, but merely as 

 accessories to the principal figures, which form the receptacles of the smoking- 

 material. 



Fig. 347. 



3 



Fia. 318. 



Figs. 347 and 348. — Stone pipes representing a heron feeding on a fish, and an otter with a fish in its 



mouth. Mound near Chillicothe. 



Fig. 347 shows the imitation of a tufted heron in the act of striking a fish. 

 It is a very good carving, composed of a brownish, speckled stone of no great 

 hardness.* The other pipe, Fig. 348, is carved in the shape of the fore-j^art of 



* Squier and Davis: Ancient Monuments; p. 259. 



