It may be questioned whether Mr. Schoolcraft was not too active in the search for symbols in his explanation of (6) as a circuitous chase. The device is either a lasso or a lariat, and relates to the possession or attempt to take possession of the buffalo. The design (5), however, well expresses ideographically the fact that the buffalo at the time was in contention, and therefore was the property half of the Indians and half of the whites. SKINS. A large number of pictographs upon the hides of animals are mentioned in the present paper. Pl. XX, with its description in the Dakota Winter Counts, infra, Chap, X, Sec. 2, is one instance. Rawhide drum-heads are also used to paint upon, as by the shamans of the Ojibwa. The use of robes made of the hides of buffalo and other large animals, painted with biographic, shamanistic, and other devices, is also mentioned in various parts of this work. A description of very early observation is now introduced, taken from John Ribault in Hakluyt (_a_). The king gaue our Captaine at his departure a plume or fanne of Hernshawes feathers died in red, and a basket made of Palmeboughes after the Indian fashion, and wrought very artificially and a great skinne painted and drawen throughout with the pictures of diuers wilde beasts so liuely drawen and pourtrayed, that nothing lacked but life. With the American use of pictographic robes may be compared the following account of the same use by Australian natives by Dr. Richard Andree (_b_). The inner side of the opossum skins worn by the blacks is also often ornamented with figures. They scratch lines into the skin, which afterward are rubbed over with fat and charcoal. FEATHERS AND QUILLS. Edward M. Kern, in Schoolcraft (_f_), reports that the Sacramento tribes of California were very expert in weaving blankets of feathers, many of them having beautiful figures worked upon them. The feather work in Mexico, Central America, and the Hawaiian Islands is well known, often having designs properly to be considered among pictographs, though in modern times not often passing beyond ornamentation. Worsnop (op. cit.) mentions that on grand occasions of the “Mindarie” (i. e., peace festival) the Australian natives decorate the bodies, face, legs, and feet with the down of wild fowl, stuck on with their own blood. The ceremony of taking the blood is very painful, yet they stand it without a murmur. It takes five or six men four to five hours to decorate one man. The blood is put on the body wet and the down stuck on the blood, showing, when finished, outlines of man’s head, face, feet, snakes, emu, fish, trees, birds, and other outlines representing the moon, stars, sun, and Aurora Australis, the whole meaning that they are at peace with the world. Mr. David Boyle (_a_) gives an account of a piece of porcupine quill work, with an illustration, a part of which is copied in Fig. 158. [Illustration: FIG. 158.--Quill pictograph.]