PREHISTORIC ART IN AMERICA. 821 



few figures of fishes and idols in gold and silver have been found in 

 very ancient deposits of guano. 



We can form only the most imperfect estimates of the dates 

 of these remains. Geological evidences give no definite clew. The 

 growth of trees over the kitchen-middens may fix dates previous to 

 which they certainly existed, but when we have admitted the five or 

 six centuries it took the trees from the time the wind wafted the seed 

 to the spot, how are we to compute the number of generations of 

 plants that were required to furnish the soil on which they could grow ? 

 One point only is ascertained, and that is that no bones of quaternary 

 animals have been met under the kitchen-middens, and, with the ex- 

 ception of the figures we have mentioned, no metallic objects. The 

 remains must, then, have been accumulated between the period of the 

 disappearance of the larger animals and the time when the metals 

 came into habitual use. Must we say, then, that during that long se- 

 ries of ages no artistic tendency revealed itself in man ? Yes, if we 

 judge by the individual objects that have been collected ; no, if we 

 attribute to that epoch the pictographs, or the figures, scenes, hiero- 

 glyphics, or rebuses, as we might call them, which are painted, en- 

 graved, and sculptured on the cliffs, the sides of caves, the bowlders, 

 and erratic rocks, or wherever a vacant space may have been offered 

 to the artist. Men have at all times with a childish vanity endeavored 

 to delineate their migrations, their contests, their hunts, and their vic- 

 tories. Egypt has transmitted its ancient history to us on granite ; 

 the rocks of Scandinavia still wear the likeness of the Vikings' ves- 

 sels ; and those around the lac des Merveilles, near Nice, bear pictures 

 of men extremely primitive in design ; curious engravings have been 

 noticed in Algeria ; the Bushmen, who are among the most degraded 

 populations of the globe, have drawn on stone, with wonderful fidelity, 

 their hunting scenes and their loves ; and the rock-paintings of New 

 Zealand, the work also of a barbarous race, but evidently superior in 

 execution to the scratches of the Bushmen, have been described before 

 the London Society of Anthropology. These are isolated facts, though 

 curious ones ; but in the two Americas the number of pictographs and 

 the extent of surface they cover give them an exceptional importance. 

 The desire, not only to reproduce striking events, but also to give pre- 

 cision to their sense by conventional signs, by graphic strokes, or by 

 hieroglyphics or phonetic or symbolical characters, is one of the most 

 remarkable traits of the different races that have succeeded each other 

 on the new continent. Although the initial date of these engravings 

 is unknown, we can nevertheless aflirm that they continued to be exe- 

 cuted through many ages, and that while the most ancient ones ascend 

 to remote epochs, in some instances these historic drawings only a lit- 

 tle while preceded the arrival of the Europeans. Pictographs are 

 especially abundant in the regions that formerly constituted Spanish 

 America : in Nicaragua^, near the extinct volcano of Masaya ; in the 



