262 NAKCOTIO USAGES AND SUPEESTITIOKS 



certainly manifests a disposition to underrate the artistic skill unmis- 

 takably diseernable in some of the works of the Mound Builders ; 

 while Mr. Haven solves the difficulty by referring such evidences 

 of art to an undetermined foreign source. After describing the 

 weapons, pottery, and personal ornaments obtained from the 

 mounds, the latter writer adds, " and, with these were found 

 sculptured figures of animals and the human head, in the form 

 of pipes, wrought with great delicacy and spirit from some of 

 the hardest stones. The last-named are relics that imply a very con- 

 siderable degree of art, and if believed to be the work of the people 

 with whose remains they are found, would tend greatly to increase 

 the wonder that the art of sculpture among them was not manifested 

 in other objects and places. The fact that nearly all the finer 

 specimens of workmanship represent birds or land and marine animals 

 belonging to a different latitude, while the pearls, the knives of obsid- 

 ian, the marine shells, and the copper, equally testify to a distant, 

 though not extra-continental origin, may however exclude these 

 from being received as proofs of local industry and skill."* A recon- 

 sideration of the list already given of animals sculptured by the ancient 

 pipe-makers of the mounds, as quoted from the narrative of 

 Messrs. Squier and Davis, along with the later additions of the for- 

 mer, set forth in a form still less in accordance with such deductions, 

 will, I conceive, satisfy the inquirer that it is quite an over statement 

 of the case to say that nearly all represent animals belonging to a 

 different latitude. The real interest, and difficulty of the question 

 lies in the fact of discovering, along with so many spirited sculptures 

 of animals pertaining to the locality, others represented with equal 

 spirit and fidelity, though belonging to different latitudes. On 

 this subject, familiarity with early British antiquities induces me to 

 regard such an assignment of all the sculptures of the mounds to a 

 foreign origin, on account of their models being in part derived from 

 distant latitudes, as a needless assumption which only shifts without 

 lessening the difficulty. On the sculptured standing stones of Scot- 

 land — belonging apparently to the closing era of paganism, and the 

 first introduction of Christianity there, — may be seen the elephant, the 

 camel, the tiger or leopard, the ape, the serpent, and other representa- 

 tions or symbols, borrowed, not like the models of the Mound Builders, 

 from a locality so near as readily to admit of the theory of direct 

 commercial intercourse, but some of them from the remote extreme 

 of Asia. The only difference between the imitations of the foreign 



* Haven's Archaeology of the United States. Page 122. 



