The second department of the drama among barbarians is their impersonations of animals, their picturesque and terrible representation of the passions and habits of reptiles, birds, and beasts. Morgan, in his History of the Iroquois, gives a list of some forty dances in which they acted out to the life stories based on their own experience and on that of the creatures beneath them. But we owe to Catlin some of the most graphic descriptions of the drama among the North American savages. In the Eagle Dance, the braves dress themselves as eagles, in plumes, feathers, beaks, talons; and they shriek, whistle, sail, swoop, in exact imitation of them. In the Wolf Dance, they go on all-fours, yelp, snarl, bark, and fill up the wolfish programme to the very letter. In the Buffalo Dance, they each wear a buffalo mask, consisting of the face, horns, and skin of a buffalo, and mimic, in ludicrous burlesque, the sounds and motions of that unwieldy creature. And so with bears, foxes, beavers, hawks, and the rest of the fauna most familiar to them. In these performances they reproduce with frenzied truth and force the most ferocious and deadly traits of their prototypes, and often, among the savages of Fiji and South Africa, the drama ends half drowned in blood. In Dahomey, where the Serpent is worshipped, the votary crawls on his belly as a snake and licks the dust before his idol, and sometimes becomes crazy with the permanent possession of his part. The barbaric mind finds intense excitement and enjoyment in these plays, hideous as they seem to us. They break up the weary monotony of his life, and introduce the relish of games and novelty and variety. They give him, what he so greatly craves, mental amusement with physical passion and exertion. They are his almost only antidote for the bane of stagnation. On the other hand, great evils result from them. They never work upward to reflect higher forms of character and life for redemptive imitation, but downward, in the impersonating of creatures whose inferiority either inflames the boastful and reckless self-complacency of the actors, or else by its reflex influences takes possession of their consciousness and animalizes them, degrading them to the level of the brutes they portray. Secondly, the reception of the idea of the beast, snake or vulture which they represent, their furious mimicry of it, the spasmodic, rhythmical, long-continued movements they make in accordance with it, tend to subject the brain to the automatic spinal and ganglionic centres below, and thus furnish the conditions and initiate the stages of all sorts of insanity. Much of the persistent degradation and ferocity of the barbaric world is to be traced to this cause.