MALLERY. ARTISTIC SKILL. 741 
These horses are far less skillfully portrayed than they are by the 
Plains tribes, which may be explained by the fact that the Mexicans 
had not yet become familiar with the animal. 
A story told by Catlin to the general effect that the Siouan stock of 
Indians did not understand the drawing of human faces in profile has 
been repeated in various forms. The last is by Popoff (a): 
When Catlin was drawing the profile of a chief named Matochiga, the Indians 
around him seemed greatly moyed, and asked why he did not draw the other half of 
the chief’s face. ‘‘ Matochiga was never ashamed to look a white man square in the 
face.” Matochiga had not till then seemed offended at the matter, but one of the In- 
dians said to him sportively, ‘‘The Yankee knows that you are only half a man, 
and he has only drawn half of your face because the other half is not worth any- 
thing.” 
Another variant of the story is that Catlin was accused of practicing 
magic, by which the half of the subject’s head should get into his power, 
and he was forced to stop his painting and flee for his life. The ex- 
plorer and painter who tells the story is not considered to be altogether 
free from exaggeration, and he may have invented the tale to amuse 
his auditors in his lectures and afterwards his readers, or he may have 
been the victim of a practical joke by the Indians, who are fond of such 
banter, and the well-known superstitions about sorcerers gaining pos- 
session of anything attached to the person would have rendered their 
anger plausible. But certain it is that the people referred to, before 
and after and at the time of the visit of Catlin to them, were in the 
habit of drawing the human face in profile, and, indeed, much more 
frequently than the full or front face. This is abundantly proved by 
many pictures in existence at that time and place which have been seen 
by this writer, and a considerable number of them are copied in the 
present work. Thus much for one of the oft-cited fictions on which the 
allegation of the Indian’s stupidity in drawing has been founded. 
Another false statement is copied over and over again by authors, to 
the effect that from a similar superstition the Indians are afraid to, and 
therefore do not, make delineations of the whole human figure. The 
present work shows their drawing of front, side, and rear views of the 
whole human figure, presenting as each view may allow, all the limbs 
and features. This, however, is rare, not from the fear charged, but 
because the artists directed their attention, not to iconography, but to 
ideography, seizing some special feature or characteristic for promi- 
nence and disregarding or intentionally omitting all that was unneces- 
sary to their purpose. 
On the other hand the Indians have sometimes been unduly praised 
for acumen in observation and for skill in their iconography. For in- 
stance, in the lectures of Mr. Edward Muybridge, explaining the highly 
interesting photographs of consecutive movements of animals from 
which he formulates the novel science of zodpraxography, the lecturer 
attributes to the Indians a scientific and artistic method of drawing 
horses in motion which has excelled in that respect all the most famous 
