450 RECORDS 



difficult of access, they have been left comparatively untouched 

 by civilization, and thus preserved their ancient beliefs and cus- 

 toms intact to the present day. The paraphernalia of the war- 

 rior of ancient times, /. e., of the gods of the present race, 

 furnish the principal symbolic objects by which prayers are ex- 

 pressed, and the most important of these articles is the cere- 

 monial arrow left as a sacrificial offering in the temples and 

 considered a carrier of prayers. It is painted and otherwise 

 decorated with symbolic emblems, and attached to it are repre- 

 sentations of other paraphernalia of the warrior, as the front 

 shield and the back shield, the latter being also viewed as the 

 mat or bed of the god. Frequently the object of the prayer is 

 incorporated in an attachment to the arrow. The vivid imagi- 

 nation of the people makes them see analogies in the most 

 heterogenous phenomena. They see serpents in the sky, the 

 clouds moving through space, the wind sweeping over the fields, 

 the rain falling down, even in their girdles and ribbons. Cer- 

 tain insects which appear during the wet season are identical 

 with corn, and corn is identical with hikuli, and hikuli with deer. 

 The same tendency to consider heterogeneous objects as iden- 

 tical may be observed in the fact that a great variety of objects 

 are considered as plumes. Clouds, cotton-wool, the white tail 

 of the deer, the deer's antlers, and even the deer itself are 

 plumes, and the serpents are believed to have plumes. Natur- 

 ally, much ambiguity is found, and there are few symbols that 

 express always the same meaning ; nor is an idea always ex- 

 pressed by the same symbol. Although this gives a certain 

 individuality to the symbolic objects, we can always trace the 

 connection between the thought to be expressed, and the sym- 

 bol expressing it. 



In Mr. Kroeber's paper it was shown with the aid of lantern 

 slides that the decorative art of the Arapahoe Indians is through- 

 out realistic (/. r., pictorial) or symbolic. Geometric patterns 

 occur, but rarely, and the general character of the art is sug- 

 gestive rather of pictography. Symbols representing animal 

 life, physical nature and abstract ideas predominate. 



Professor Boas showed that a series of measurements of chil- 



