The legs terminate in wonderfully well-drawn eagle's feet, armed with vigorously curved talons. A very interesting feature of the design is the highly conventionalized wing, which is attached to the shoulder behind, and fills the space beneath the uplifted arm. A broad many-feathered tail is spread out like a fan behind the legs. The right hand figure, so far as seen, is an exact duplicate of the left. A design of undetermined significance occupies the space between the figures beneath the crossed arms; it may represent conventionalized drapery, but is more probably symbolic in its character. The heads have probably been a little too large for good proportion, but the details of the anatomy are excellent. The muscles of the shoulder, the breast and nipple, the waist, the buttock, and the calves of the legs are in excellent drawing. The whole group is most graphically presented. A highly ideal design, it is made to fill a given space with a directness of execution and a unity of conception that is truly surprising. [Illustration: PL. LXXIV--ENGRAVED GORGET--FIGHTING FIGURES. Tennessee. (1/1)] Let us turn for a moment from this striking effort of the mound-builders to the early efforts of other peoples in the engraver's art. Here are the drawings of the Troglodytes of France, scintillations of paleolithic genius, which appear as a flash of light in the midst of a midnight sky. They are truly remarkable. The clear-cut lines that shadow forth the hairy mammoth suggest the graphic and forcible work of the Parisian of to-day. The rude Esquimaux of our own time engraves images of a great variety of natural objects on his ornaments and implements of ivory in a manner that commands our admiration. But these shell tablets have designs of a much higher grade. They not only represent natural objects with precision, but they delineate conceptions of mythical creatures of composite character for which nature affords no model. In execution the best of these tablets will not compare with the wonderful works in stucco and stone of Palenque, or the elaborate sculptures of the Aztecs, but they are, like them, vigorous in action and complete in conception.