712 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
he has been in some way unfortunate. Among the Mandan a yellow 
hand on the breast signifies that the wearer had captured prisoners. 
Among the Titon Dakota a hand displayed meant that the wearer 
had engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with an enemy. The impress 
of a hand, stained or muddy, upon the body or horse was the Winne- 
bago mark that the wearer had killed a man. 
The drawing of linked fingers or joined hands has been before dis- 
cussed, p. 645, and in several petroglyphs illustrated in this paper the 
single hand appears. It is a common device on rocks, and doubtless 
with varieties of signification, as above mentioned in other forms of 
pictograph. 
It will suffice now to add that the figure of a hand with extended 
fingers is very common in the vicinity of ruins in Arizona as a rock 
etching, and is also frequently seen daubed on the rocks with colored 
pigments or white clay. But Mr. Thomas V. Keam 
explains the Arizona drawings of hands on the au- 
thority of the living Moki. In his MS., in deserib- 
Fig. 1177.— Joined hands. ing Fig. MNT Re Saya: 
Moki. The outline of two outstretched hands joined at the wrists 
and figure of a hand with extended fingers is very common as a rock etching. 
These are vestiges of the test formerly practiced among young men who aspired 
for admission to the fraternity of Salyko. The Salyko is a trinity of two women 
and a woman from whom the Hopitu obtained the first corn. The first test above 
referred to was that of putting their hands in the mud and impressing them upon 
the rock. Only those were chosen as novices the imprints of whose hands had dried 
on the instant. 
Le Plongeon (a) tells that the tribes of Yucatan have the custom of 
printing the impress of the human hand, dipped in a red-colored liquid, 
on the walls of certain sacred edifices. 
A. W. Howitt, in manuscript notes on Australian pictographs, says: 
In very many places there are representa tions of a human hand imprinted or delinea- 
ted upon the rocks or in caverns. In the mountains on the western side of the Darling 
river, in New South Wales, I have observed such, and the aborigines whom I ques- 
tioned upon the subject said that these representations were made in sport. This 
reply would, however, be also given were any white man to find and draw their at- 
tention to one of the figures which are made in connection with the initiation cere- 
monies. The representations of hands are made in two ways. In one the hand is 
smeared with red ocher and water, and impressed upon the rock surface. In the 
other the hand, being placed upon the rock,a mouthful of red ocher or pipe-clay and 
water is squirted over it. The hand being then removed there remains its represen- 
tation surrounded and marked out by the colored wash. 
Thomas Worsnop (b) says: 
Mr. Winnecke, in 1879, saw several drawings on rocks and in caves, [Fig. 1178], 
and «lescribes them as follows: 
There are found in several large caves near Mount Skinner and Ledang hill, in 
latitude 22° 30’ south and longtitude 134° 30’ east. The natives appear to have 
selected the smooth surface of granite rocks inside several large caves, which spots 
are not subject to the influence of wind or rain. These caves are resorted to by the 
natives during excessive rainy seasons, as indicated by their camp preparations, and 
