Under this head of messages and communications may be included the material objects sent as messages, many accounts of which are published. It is to be expected that graphic representations of the same or similar objects, with corresponding arrangement, should have similar significance. Among the Indians painted arrows, bearing messages when discharged, are familiar. The Turkish Selam, or flower letters, are in the same category. The following account of a “diplomatic packet” is extracted from Schoolcraft, Vol. III, p. 306, _et seq._: In the month of August, 1852, a message reached the President of the United States, by a delegation of the Pueblos of Tesuque in New Mexico, offering him friendship and intercommunication; and opening, symbolically, a road from the Moqui country to Washington. * * * This unique diplomatic packet consists of several articles of symbolic import. The first is the official and ceremonial offer of the peace-pipe. This is symbolized by a joint of the maize, five and a half inches long, and half an inch in diameter. The hollow of the tube is filled by leaves of a plant which represents tobacco. It is stopped to secure the weed from falling out, by the downy yellow under plumage of some small bird. Externally, around the center of the stalk, is a tie of white cotton twisted string of four strands, (not twisted by the distaff,) holding, at its end, a small tuft of the before-mentioned downy yellow feathers, and a small wiry feather of the same species. The interpreter has written on this, “The pipe to be smoked by the President.” * * The object is represented in the cut, A, [represented in Figure 63.] [Illustration: FIG. 63.--Part of diplomatic packet.]