Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/612

594 aboriginal skill. The series of lines and dots are regular, and the faintly outlined snake's tongue is true to nature; as is also the end of the object, which represents with marked fidelity the rattle of the rattlesnake. The Indian who could make this carving had a wide range of capabilities in the line of artistic representation.

And now a word, in conclusion, with reference to pictorial representation, where many objects, and these in action, are concerned. We know how, in recent times, the Western Indian depicted with spirit a fight with other Indians or a buffalo-hunt. If, then, in prehistoric time and at the time of the continent being first peopled with Europeans, our Delaware Indian was capable of such artistic efforts as have been briefly commented upon in the preceding pages, might he not likewise have essayed in this direction also, and recorded events by the grouping of men and animals on slabs of stone? The pictured rocks on the Susquehanna show a disposition to accomplish this on a large scale; but I refer more particularly to ornament gorgets. It is scarcely safe, and certainly not logical, to decry such specimens, however startling the subject treated or artistically accomplished. Perhaps through some such pictured stone we may yet learn that the Indian was present when the last mastodon and giant elk in the valley of the Delaware bit the dust.



Y memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the neighborhood of Oxford; but when, nevertheless, bibliolatry was rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God, the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural sequence, the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools.

In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my authorization, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher, ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of theology, outside that patronized by his own narrow school, poured forth, from the safe intrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to