•60 REVIEWS — THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 



with his right arm extended and ■waving over the gaping crowd, to whom he is 

 vaunting forth, without modesty, the surprising skill he has acquured in his art, 

 and the undoubted efficacy of his medicine or mystery." 



Such, in a greatly condensed form, is the American artist's lively 

 narrative of his first sight of a native medicine-man of the Blackfeet 

 Indians on the Yellow Stone River. 



By one of the curious coincidences so frequent in his work, the 

 Abbe Domenech gives, as pictorial illustration, the very Blackfoot 

 Medicine Man sketched by Catlin under the circumstances narrated 

 above ; but in lieu of his graphic and circumstantial details, we have 

 only some vapid generalities about " The Doctor-magician-priests," 

 after which our author thus proceeds : " The dress they wear seems the 

 effort of an imagination in delirium. We shall describe the one 

 which to us appeared the most extraordinary. The science of the 

 doctor in question was in great renown among the Indians, (what In- 

 dians ?) and his costume de circonstance equally well-known among the 

 pale-faces ;" and so he goes on, describing the very same Yellow Bear 

 skin dress ; which, as Catlin exhibited it both in Paris and London, 

 it is very possible he did see, and think " the most extraordinary." 



We have said enough to show the value of our author's contribu- 

 tions for behoof of his brother members of the Ethnographical So- 

 ciety of France. The Parisian savans must be equally delighted with 

 his archseological and topographical novelties from the New World, 

 The landscapes are copied, or rather " made up," from similar sour- 

 ces to those already noted as laid under contribution. The " Natural 

 Hill," for example, as it is somewhat oddly designated, is a 

 slovenly copy of " Pyramid Mountain in the Valley Laguna Colora- 

 do," figured from a careful drawing in the " Report of the Geology 

 of the Route explored by Lieut. A. W. Whipple, of the U. S. 

 Topographical Engineers," printed at Washington in 1856 ; and the 

 others are cribbed in like fashion, without acknowledgment. The 

 Indian relics have been dug up out of previous publications with 

 the same honest and naive perseverance. The plate of "Ancient 

 Pipes," (vol. i. p. 392) is culled from the well-known "Smithsonian" 

 volume of Messrs. Squire and Davis's " Ancient Monuments of the 

 Mississippi Valley," from whence also are borrowed the plates of 

 Ancient Pottery, but all printed of a uniform brick-red, in happy 

 indifference to the texture of the originals, of sand-stone, porphyry, 

 yellow clay, &c. The calumet and pipes figured at p. 272, vol. ii., 



