92 DANIEL WILSON ON THE ARTISTIC 



The stiidio of Edmouia Lewis, the sculptor, has long been known to tourists visiting 

 Rome. Her history is a curious one. Her father was a Negro, and her mother a Chippewa 

 Indian. She was born at Greenbush, on the Hudson River, and reared among the Indians 

 till the age of fourteen, both of her parents having died in her childhood. Her Indian 

 name was Suhkuhegarequa, or Wildfire ; but she changed it to that by which she is now 

 known on being admitted to the Moravian school at 01)erlin, Ohio. After three years 

 schooling, she went to Boston, where, it is said, the sight of the fine statue of Franklin 

 awoke in her the ambition to be a sculptor. She sought out William Lloyd Grarrison, and 

 in simple directness told him she wanted to do something like the statue of the printer- 

 statesman. The great abolitionist befriended her. . She received needful training in a 

 local studio, started an atelier of her own, and when I saw her in Boston, in 1864, she was 

 modelling a life-size statue emblematic of the emancipation of the race to which she, in 

 part, belonged. Africa was impersonated, raising herself from a prostrate attitude, and, 

 with her hand shading her eyes, was looking at the dawn. Soon after the sculptor went to 

 Rome, and she has there executed works of considerable merit. Her most successful pro- 

 ductions may be assumed to rellect the artistic aptitudes of her mother's race. Her two 

 best works in marble are " Hiawatha's Wooing," and " Hiaw^atha's Wedding." A Boston 

 critic, in reviewing her works, says : " She has always had remarkable power of manipula- 

 tion, beginning with beads and wampum, and rising today. She has fine artistic feeling 

 and talent, a sort of instinct for form and beauty demanding outward expression." 



The wide diffusion of this imitative faculty and feeling for form, was no doubt stimulat- 

 ed by its employment for representative and symbolic purposes. The relation of imitative 

 drawing to written language is equally manifest in the graven records of the Nile valley 

 and the analogous inscriptions of Yucatan, or Pervi. Qnipus, wampum, and all other 

 mnemonic systems, dependent on the transmission of images and ideas from one genera- 

 tion to another, literally, by word of mouth, have within themseh^es no such germ of higher 

 development, as the picture-writing or sculpturing of the early Egyptians, from which 

 all the alphabets of Europe have been evolved. The phonetic signs, inherited by us 

 directly from the Romans, seem so simple, and yet are of such priceless value in their 

 application, that it seems natural to think of the letters of Cadmus as a gift not less won- 

 derful than speech ; since, by their instrumentality, the wise of all ages speak to us still. 

 Plutarch tells, in his ''De Iside et Osiride," that when Thoth, the God of letters, first 

 appeared on the earth, the inhabitants of Egypt had no language, Init only uttered the 

 cries of animals. They had, at least, no language with which to speak to other genera- 

 tions; nor any common speech to supersede the confusion of tongues which characterised 

 their great river valley, bordering on Asia, and forming the highway from Ethiopia to 

 the Mediteranean Sea. The light thrown for lis on the climate, the fauna, the people, 

 and the whole social life of Europe's Palœolithic Era, by a few graphic delineations of its 

 primitive artists, suffices to show how the northern Thoth may have manifested his advent 

 among them. 



The condition of the Indian tribes in the Northwest, in British Columbia, and in the 

 territories of the United States, abundantly illustrates the effect of a multiplicity of lan- 

 guages among nomad savages. The Blackfeet are in reality a political and not an ethnical 

 confederation, with at least three distinct languages, and numerous dialects spoken among 

 their dispersed tribes. The same condition is found among the Kiawakaskaia Indians, be- 



