300 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters. 
of the state all the greater. The effigies of Ohio are some of them to be 
preserved by especial enactment. The serpent effigy has been purchased 
and the ground about it laid out in a public park. No public movement 
has, however, taken place in Wisconsin, which looks toward the preser¬ 
vation of these most interesting monuments. They are rapidly disap¬ 
pearing. At the present rate of destruction, it will not be long before 
they will all be gone beyond recovery. When an effigy has been destroyed 
it is impossible to restore it. If it is reconstructed it has a modern look 
to it and lacks the peculiar air and grace which a native hand alone 
could give. The touch of the white man’s hand is different from that of 
the mound-builder. It would be useless for him to attempt to recon¬ 
struct these animal forms. 
Many things have been impressed upon us from the study of these ef¬ 
figies, some of which we have already embodied in the work on Em¬ 
blematic Mounds which was published in 1890. Other things, however, 
have been brought to light by later explorations and to these we would 
now call attention: 
I. In reference to the imitative skill of the effigy-builders, it is well 
known that early and rude races had this in a remarkable degree. We 
need only to go to the cave-dwellers of Europe to be convinced of this. 
Here we find the mammoth, the reindeer, the horse, and many other ani¬ 
mals plainly drawn on pieces of ivory. They are excellent imitations 
and show that the early races excelled in this. We do not, to be sure, 
recognize in these the religious feeling which was exercised in erecting 
effigies on the soil of Wisconsin. There are however inscribed figures 
on the cylinders which have come down to us from the early historic 
times, which have more of this religious symbolism embodied in them. 
We do not know that these figures are totemistic in their design, but 
they are symbolic at least and are wonderful imitations. Let us take 
the cylinder that belongs to Sargon, 3300 before Christ. Here we find 
Izdubar watering the sacred oxen. The oxen have wide-spread, branch¬ 
ing horns and small bodies — resembling Texan cattle. The human fig¬ 
ures have strange, wild faces and shaggy hair and resemble Scythians 
but the drawings are excellent, the muscles are plainly seen on the oxen, 
the expression in the faces is striking, and the water which flows from 
the vessels is very like water. The effigies of Wisconsin are prob¬ 
ably not as old as these figures from the caves of Europe or from the 
mounds of Chaldea, but they show the same imitative skill. Let me 
illustrate this: There is an effigy on the east bank of Lake Mendota but 
two or three miles from the capitol which represents a deer in the atti¬ 
tude of jumping. (See plate XII.) The deer has the head partly 
thrown back, the rump thrown up, the hind legs drawn toward the 
body very much as any deer would jump. An instantaneous pho¬ 
tograph could not take the o attitude better than did these native 
artists. The effigy comes to its place remarkably well, when the meas- 
