1898-99. | PRIMITIVE NATURE STUDY. 335 
upon them at first sight. They often paint the cow fighting or chasing 
aman. These Indians describe the novel sights. I have not seen a 
single painting of an Indian or an animal which originally belonged on 
this pampa. The white man, the cow and chicken cock are their favourite 
studies. On the white walls of their houses, inside and out, such figures 
appear as a decoration. In the rooms of the government houses the 
best artist displayed his talent, and those drawings on the walls of the 
market place are admired by ali who go there. So much taste and 
caution have the boys and little children, that none of them are known 
to disfigure any of these paintings in the public market-place. 
“The Indians of Cuzco have had some of the most beautiful, large 
and costly paintings hung before them in the churches of that ancient 
city. The Church encourages this taste; yet we saw nothing there like 
what we find among these people who have never had lessons set them, 
and the natural scenery here is less calculated to draw upon the 
imagination. The whole country is a dead level: the view only extends 
to the horizon, the sky above, and one continued sheet of herd-grass 
below. 
“The Mojos Indian makes a scene for himself, and describes it with 
coloured paints. On a windy day he strikes light and puts fire to the dry 
prairie-grass. As the wind carries the fire swiftly along, and the sheets 
of blaze shoot up under the heavy cloud of smoke, the Indian sketches 
the effect produced upon the cattle, who toss their tails into the air, and 
rush in fear with heads erect at the top of their speed in an opposite 
direction to that from which the wind comes. He decorates the inside 
wall of his house with this scene, which is a common one on these 
prairie lands.” 
Nor are primitive peoples unobservant of the gentler, serener aspects 
of Nature. Poets of all races and all ages have sung of the 
‘* Stars of morning, dewdrops which the sun 
Impearls on every leaf and every flower,” 
and it would be strange indeed if the languages and legends of the 
uncivilized races of men had nothing to say of the dew. — Classical 
myths tell of the rosy-fingered Eos, goddess of Dawn, weeping over the 
loss of Memnon, her son,—the dewdrops on the grass are her unremitting 
tears, and from them are born all the flowers upon earth. The natives 
of the Samoan Islands,in the South Pacific, call the dew-drops the tears 
which the Heaven-God, father of all things, nightly lets fall upon the 
bosom of Earth, mother of all, from whom he was torn asunder in the 
long ago. Among the deities of the Mayas, of Yucatan, were ah ppua, 
“the Master of Dew,” and /tzamna, “the Dew or Moisture of the 
