744 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
showing their conception and motive to be the same. In this respect 
the drawing of the Indians may be likened to that of boys at a public 
school, who are always drawiig, and drawing the same objects and with 
constant repetition of the same errors from one school generation to 
another. 
In discussing artistic skill only in its relation to picture-writing the — 
degree of its excellence is not intrinsically important, though it may be 
so for comparison and identification. The figures required were the 
simplest. Among these were vertical and horizontal straight lines and 
their combinations, circles, squares, triangles, a hand, a foot, an ax or 
a bow, a boat or a sledge. Both natural and artificial objects were 
drawn by a few strokes without elaboration. The fewer the marks the 
more convenient was the pictograph, if it fulfilled its object of being 
recognized by the reader. The simple fact without esthetic effect was 
all that the pictographie artists wanted to show, and when an animal 
was represented it was not by imitation of its whole form, but by em- 
phasis of some characteristic which must be made obvious, even if it 
distorted the figure or group and violated every principle of art as now 
developed. 
