308 
PAINTED REPRESENTATIONS OP ANIMALS. 
discovered, in places where there exist lines of fortification, 
and the walls of towns constructed by some unknown na- 
tion, now entirely extinct. The paintings on these fragments 
have a great similitude to those which are executed in our 
days on earthenware by the natives of Louisiana and Flo- 
rida. Thus too, the Indians of Maypures often painted be- 
fore our eyes the same ornamentB as those we had observed 
in the cavern of Ataruipe, on the vases containing human 
bones. They were grecques, meanders, and figures of croco- 
diles, of monkeys, and of a large quadruped which I could not 
recognize, though it had always the same squat form . I might 
hazard the hypothesis that it belongs to another country, 
aud that the type had been brought thither in the great 
migration of the American nations from the north-west to 
the south and south-east ; but I am rather inclined to be- 
lieve that the figure is intended to represent a tapir, and 
that the deformed image of a native animal has become by 
degrees one of the types that has been preserved. 
The Maypures execute witli the greatest skill grecques, o r 
ornaments formed by straight lines variously combined, 
similar to those that we find on the vases of Magna Grecia, 
on the Mexican edifices at Mitla, and in the works of 30 
many nations who, without communication with each other, 
find alike a sensible pleasure in the symmetric repetition ot 
the same forms. Arabesques, meanders, and grecques, 
please our eyes, because the elements of which their series 
composed, follow in rhythmic order. The eye finds in tin 
order, in the periodical return of the same forms, what tb 
ear distinguishes in the cadenced succession of sounds an 
concords. Can we then admit a doubt that the feeling 0 ^ 
rhythm manifests itself in man at the first dawn of civile®' 
tion, and in the rudest essays of poetry and song ? 
Among the natives of Maypures, the making of pottery 
is an occupation principally confined to the women. The; 
purify the clay by repeated washings, form it into cylinder > 
and mould the largest vases with their hands. The A®® 
ricau Indian is unacquainted with the potter’s wheel, whJ® 
was familiar to the nations of the east in the remotest au^ 
quity. We may be surprised that the missionaries have n 
introduced this simple aud useful machine among the natir 
of the Orinoco, yet we must recollect that three centurw 
