The study of all the charts renders plain some points remaining in doubt while the Lone-Dog chart was the only example known. It became clear that there was no fixed or uniform mode of exhibiting the order of continuity of the year-characters. They were arranged spirally or lineally, or in serpentine curves, by boustrophedon or direct, starting backward from the last year shown or proceeding uniformly forward from the first year selected or remembered. Any mode that would accomplish the object of continuity with the means of regular addition seemed equally acceptable. So a theory advanced that there was some symbolism in the right-to-left circling of Lone-Dog’s chart was abandoned, especially when an obvious reproduction of that very chart was made by an Indian with the spiral reversed. It was also obvious that when copies were made, some of them probably from memory, there was no attempt at Chinese accuracy. It was enough to give the graphic or ideographic character, and frequently the character is better defined on one of the charts than on the others for the corresponding year. One interpretation would often throw light on the others. It also appeared that, while different events were selected by the recorders of the different systems, there was sometimes a selection of the same event for the same year and sometimes for the next, such as would be natural in the progress of a famine or epidemic, or as an event gradually became known over a vast territory. A test of the mode of selecting events for designating the Winter Counts may be found in a suggestion made by the present writer in his account of Lone-Dog’s chart, published in 1877, as follows: The year 1876 has furnished good store of events for the recorder’s choice, and it will be interesting to learn whether he has selected as the distinguishing event the victory over Custer, or, as of still greater interest, the general seizure of ponies, whereat the tribes, imitating Rachel, weep and will not be comforted, because they are not. It now appears that two of the Counts made for 1876 and observed by the writer several years later have selected the event of the seizure of the ponies, and that none of them make any allusion to the defeat of Custer.