150 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
Humboldt, they arise from the fact that he did not content himself with describing 
what he had seen. This is illustrated by the following sentence: ‘‘ There is even 
seen on a grassy plain near Uruana an isolated granite rock on which, according 
to the account of trustworthy people, there are seen at a height of 80 feet deeply 
carved images which appear arranged in rows and represent the sun, the moon, and 
different species of animals, especially crocodiles and boas.” Elsewhere he speaks 
of kitchen and household utensils and of a number of objects which he can only 
have seen with the eyes of his imagination. 
Other illustrations of pictographs in Venezuela are presented as 
Figs. 152, 153, 1105 and 1106, infra. 
BRAZIL. 
Remarks of general applicability to this region are made by Mr. J. 
Whitfield (a), an abstract of which follows: 
The rock inscriptions were visited in August, 1865. Several similar inscriptions 
are said to exist in the interior of the province of Ceara, as well as in the provinces 
of Pernambuco and Piauhy, especially in the Sertaods, that is, in the thinly-wooded 
parts of the interior, but no mention is ever made of their having been seen near the 
coast. 
In the margin and bed only of the riyer are the rocks inscribed. On the margin 
they extend in some instances to 15 or 20 yards. Except in the rainy season the 
stream is dry. The rock is a silicious schist of excessively hard and flinty texture. 
The marks have the appearance of having been made with a blunt, heavy tool, such 
as might be made with an almost worn-out mason’s hammer. The situation is about 
midway between Serra Grande or Ibiapaba and Serra Merioca, about 70 miles from 
the coast and 40 west of the town Sobral. The native population attribute all the 
‘‘ Letreiros ” (inscriptions), as they do everything else of which they have no informa- 
tion, to the Dutch, as records of hidden wealth. The Dutch, however, only occupied 
the country for a few years in the early part of the seventeenth century. Along the 
coast numerous forts, the works of the Dutch, still remain; but there are no authentic 
records of their ever having established themselves in the interior of the country, and 
less probability still of their amusing themselves with inscribing puzzling hiero- 
glyphics, which must have been a work of time, on the rocks of the far interior, for 
the admiration of wandering Indians. 
Mr. Franz Keller (@) narrates as follows regarding Fig. 110: 
I found a “written rock” covered with spiral lines and concentric rings, evenly 
carved in the black gneiss-like material, and similar to those of the Caldeirao. 
Looking about for more, I discovered a perfect inscription, whose straight orderly 
lines can hardly be thought the result of lazy Indians’ “hours of idleness.” These 
characters were incised on a very hard smooth block 3 feet 4 inches in length, and 
34 feet in height and breadth. It lay at an angle of 45°, only 8 feet above low water, 
and close to the water’s edge of the second smaller rapid, the Cachoeira do Ribeirao. 
The transverse section of the characters is not very deep, and their surface is as worn 
as that of the inscription farther down. In some places they are almost effaced by 
time and are to be seen distinetly only with a favorable light. A dark brown coat 
of glaze, found everywhere on the surface of the stones, laved at times by the water, 
covers the block so uniformly well on the concave glyphs as on the parts untouched 
by instrument, that many ages must have elapsed since some patient Indian spent 
long hours in eutting them out with his quartz chisel. As the lines of the inserip- 
tion run almost perfectly horizontally, and as the figures near the Caldeirao and the 
Cachoeira and the Cachoeira das Lages are so little above low-water mark, the 
present position of the block seems to have been the original one. * * * On the 
rocky shores of the Araguaya, that huge tributary of the Tocantino, there are similar 
rude outlines of animals near a rapid called Martirios, from the first Portuguese ex- 
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