LAUFER, THE DECORATIVE ART OF THE AMUR TRIBES. 29 



the cock at both ends of the body, a kind of Janus-cock. A still more striking 

 example of the same case is met with in the two following specimens. 



These are the decorated sides of birch-bark boxes. In Fig. 5, Plate x, the 

 whole trapezoidal piece is divided into three fields ; the narrow strip below, 

 along the edge, being filled up with a spur-ornament. The trapezoid above 

 it contains two peculiarly conventionalized cocks of Type H. The two outer 

 cocks have their heads turned downward, and on their bodies a realistic fish, 

 in which eye, gill, and the conventional picture of a fish are drawn. The tail of 

 the fish is identical with the cock s head. Each of the two inner cocks shows 

 two spirals, the larger of which seems to denote the tail-feathers, and the 

 smaller one the pinions, completed by two parallel projections above it. The 

 upper of these is shaped into the conventional form of a fish by the addition of a 

 semicircular figure indicating the fish s head. The two cocks in either half of this 

 symmetrical ornament are combined with each other by a wave-line, the concav 

 ities of which the cocks occupy. The same motive is met with in the ornaments 

 above this trapezoid, only that here conventionalization has advanced much 

 further. The heads may easily be found by a comparison with the cocks in the 

 centre below, the bodies being spirals, and the tail-feathers joining above in 

 purely geometrical figures. On the ground of this stage of conventionalization, 

 also, the two tapering figures in the right and left corners are to be explained. 

 These corner figures proceed below, and each forms here a fish rather true to 

 nature, although placed in a kind of scroll. Head, eye, the curved body, a ventral 

 fin, and the bipartite tail are discernible. 



The pattern Fig. 6, Plate x, is doubly symmetrical above and below, as well 

 as on the right and the left. The whole ornament can be traced back to a figure 

 which represents a wave-line, in the hollows of which two types of cock are placed. 

 One of these types has a remarkably long process at the end of the head, a con 

 ventionalized fish between the head and this part, its body being indicated by a 

 spiral. The other type strongly approaches that in Fig. 5, in the interior of the 

 central trapezoid, with the fish-body attached to the back part of the head, as 

 there. The wing-feather has here become a spiral, as have also the body and 

 the tail. 



THE FISH. That the fish plays a very important part in the decorative art 

 of the Amur tribes has already become evident from various examples in which it 

 occurred in connection with the cock, sometimes drawn on its body, mostly in 

 strongly conventionalized form. We shall now enter upon a special examination 

 of the subject, and demonstrate by some designs how this conventionalization has 

 developed from the realistic picture of the fish. 



In Figs, i and i a, Plate xi, the long and short sides of a birch-bark basket 

 of the Gold are represented, in which portions of the pattern are cut out of bark 

 and sewed on the bark forming the basket. In Fig. i the arrangement of the 

 pattern is very gracefully executed by a finely drawn wave-line, the course of 

 which is interrupted in the centre by two combatant cocks designed almost true 



