© 
THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
VoL. x1x.—OCTOBER, 1885.—No. 10. 
MYTHIC DRY-PAINTINGS OF THE NAVAJOS. 
BY DR. W. MATTHEWS. 
DESIRE, in this article, to call the attention of ethnographers 
to some pictures which are among the most transitory in the 
history of human art. They are the work of the Navajo Indians, 
a people who make no graven images of their gods, who do not 
decorate skins or robes, who place no symbdls on their rude and 
rarely-made pottery, and may be said to have no rock inscriptions, 
A few slightly scratched sketches on the cliffs of Arizona and New 
Mexico may, perhaps, be attributed to them; but the vast 
Majority of carvings on stone in their country, and all of the 
most permanent character, are the work of the sedentary races. 
Seeing no evidence of a symbolic art among them, one might 
readily be led to suppose that they possessed none. Such was 
my opinion for two years after I had come to reside near them. 
Such is the opinion of many white men, who have lived for 
periods of from ten to twenty years among them. 
During my residence of nearly four years in New Mexico I had 
heard of these drawings through the less conservative Indians 
and through a Mexican who had been many years captive among 
them. But it was not until last November, when I made a spe- 
cial journey to the Navajo country under the auspices of the 
Bureau of Ethnology, that I obtained unrestricted access to the 
medicine-lodge, saw the hieratic figures drawn, and was given 
Permission to sketch them, much to the horror of the large 
Majority of the assembled multitude. 
The medicine-lodge, on the floor of which these pictures are 
made, is a simple conical structure of logs in the shape of an 
VOL, XIX.—No, X. 6r 
