308 PAINTED KEPHESENTATIONS OF ANIMALS. 



discovered in places where there exist lines of fortification, 

 and the walls of towns constructed by some unknown na- 

 tion, now entirely extinct. The paintings on these fragments 

 have a great similitude to those which are executed in our 

 days on earthenware by the natives of Louisiana and Flo- 

 rida. Thus too, the Indians of Maypures often painted be- 

 fore our eyes the same ornaments as those we had observed 

 in the cavern of Ataruipe, on the vases containing human 

 bones. They were grecques, meanders, and figures of croco- 

 diles, of monkeys, and of a large quadruped which I could not 

 recognize, though it had always the same squat form. I might 

 hazard the hypothesis that it belongs to another country, 

 aud that the type had been brought thither in the great 

 migration of the American nations from the north-west to 

 the south and south-east ; but I am rather inclined to be- 

 lieve that the figure is intended to represent a tapir, and 

 that the deformed image of a native animal has become by 

 degrees one of the types that has been preserved. 



The Maypures execute with the greatest skill grecques, or 

 ornaments formed by straight hnes variously combined, 

 similar to those that we find on the vases of Magna GTrecia, 

 on the Mexican edifices at Mitla, and in the works of so 

 many nations who, without communication with each other, 

 find alike a sensible pleasure in the symmetric repetition of 

 the same forms. Arabesques, meanders, and grecques, 

 please our eyes, because the elements of which their series is 

 composed, follow in rhythmic order. The eye finds in this 

 order, in the periodical return of the same forms, what the 

 ear distinguishes in the cadenced succession of sounds and 

 concords. Can we then admit a doubt that the feeling of 

 rhythm manifests itself in man at the first dawn of civiliza- 

 tion, and in the rudest essays of poetry and song ? 



Among the natives of Maypures, the making of pottery 

 is an occupation principally confined to the women. They 

 purify the clay by repeated washings, form it into cylinders, 

 and mould the largest vases with their hands. The Ame- 

 rican Indian is unacquainted with the potter's wheel, which 

 was familiar to the nations of the east in the remotest anti- 

 quity. "We may be surprised that the missionaries have not 

 introduced this simple and useful machine among the natives 

 of the Orinoco, yet we must recollect that three centuries 



