822 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLT. 



United States of Colombia, on the banks of the Orinoco ; and in Vene- 

 zuela, where in consequence of their antiquated condition they will 

 soon cease to be distinguishable. The rocks of Honduras are covered 

 with sharply-cut designs ; the conquistador es, in 1520, remarked simi- 

 lar works in the Isthmus of Darien ; and in the State of Panama en- 

 tire cliffs were charged with hieroglyphics that might afford matter 

 for very interesting studies. In the Sierra Nevada, between Colum- 

 bus, Nevada, and Benton, California, are hosts of figures of men and 

 animals and uninterpretable signs. About twenty miles south of Ben- 

 ton, the road follows a narrow defile, bounded on both sides by nearly 

 perpendicular rocks, and these are covered with figures in respect to 

 which no clew exists as to the people that designed them. 



Pictographs are little less numerous in Arizona, New Mexico, and 

 Colorado — in parts of the country which, though now desolate, were 

 formerly inhabited by a considerable population. The glacier-polished 

 bowlders of the valley of the Gila River have figures that may be 

 compared with those of Thuringia. On the banks of the Mancos and 

 the San Juan, and in the deep canons stretching up toward the east, 

 the figures are visible at dizzy heights, some deeply engraved, others 

 drawn in red or white. Among them is a procession of men, animals, 

 and birds with long necks and legs, all going in the same direction. 

 Two of the men are standing on a sledge drawn by a deer, while oth- 

 ers direct the march of the drove. The artist evidently intended to 

 represent a migration of his tribe. In another pictograph on the banks 

 <of the San Juan, among figures of strange forms and of drawing in- 

 correct but full of movement and life, may be recognized a number of 

 fliint hatchets, exactly similar in pattern to the symbolical hatchets 

 that are cut on the megaliths of Brittany. At another spot, a cliff is 

 ■covered, for a space of more than sixty square feet, with figures of 

 -men, deer, and lizards ; and M. Bandelier has seen, near the ruins of 

 Pecos, pictographs, the high antiquity of which is attested by the de- 

 gree of effacement they have undergone. They represent the tracks 

 'of men or children, a human figure, and a tolerably regular circle. On 

 the banks of the Puerco and the Zuni, two of the affluents of the Colo- 

 rado Chiquito, designs have been remarked having the appearance 

 of hieroglyphics, but their significance is unknown, and we can not 

 even affirm that they had any. The cliffs near Salt Lake in Utah 

 are adorned with sculptures, among which are human figures of the 

 natural size, cut in a hard rock more than thirty feet above the ground. 

 All together show an amount of labor of which the Indians are inca- 

 pable, and a sum of difficulties which they could not have overcome ; 

 and the height at which some of the sculptures appear allows the sup- 

 position that some geological phenomenon, perhaps a depression of 

 the lake, may have occurred since they were executed. Many draw- 

 ings on stone have also been observed in the eastern parts of the 

 . United States. 



