As many other people have done concerning their own handiwork, Mr. Catlin overestimated the intrinsic value of his paintings and specimens, and made the mistake of thinking that everybody would surely be as enthusiastic as himself. The British government did not buy the gallery. Even the platform and Mr. Catlin’s nephew could not save the ship. In Belgium financial embarrassment overtook the painter and his works. The whole material was likely to go under the hammer, when Mr. Thomas Harrison, a wealthy Philadelphian, advanced the money and took the collection as security, with the understanding that it could be redeemed. This proving beyond Mr. Catlin’s means, all of the paintings and specimens were transferred to Philadelphia and stored until Mr. Harrison’s death, when his widow presented the entire gallery to the National Museum, together with such dresses, etc., as time and moths had spared. Perhaps you have heard that the Washington pictures are not the originals. The facts are these: After transferring his material in Belgium to Mr. Harrison, Mr. Catlin traveled throughout North America, and even in South America, making aboriginal sketches. This second collection was exhibited for a time in the west corridor of the Smithsonian. On his death, in 1872, the pictures were packed up and stored in the Smithsonian building until 1876, when they were transferred to the Philadelphia Exposition. They are now to be seen in the permanent exhibition there. Now for the pictures. A great American ethnologist says “Catlin is the great American Indian liar;” another, quite as eminent, says that when he showed one of these pictures to a Sioux Indian, the latter was affected to tears at the recognition of a dear friend long deceased. Both were right. Recently M. Achille Collin, a French sculptor, was employed to produce several busts of celebrated Indians, from photographs and portraits, for the New Orleans Exposition. Among them was Osceola, whose portrait is in the Catlin gallery. Fortunately, the Museum has also Osceola’s death mask. M. Collin found that Catlin had placed the eyes too far apart, and had perpetrated several other little artistic outrages, yet the sculptor was able to rectify these and to produce a wonderful bust of the wily Seminole. In one sense everything is wrong in these paintings, in another sense they are teeming with life and spirit. A French critic said in the Paris _Constitutionnel_: “A professional painter is perfectly lost in the presence of a nature new to him, in such singular lands, such original colors of sky, foliage and men.” You must know a language in order to appreciate its beauties, you must know Indian life to appreciate Catlin. His images do not pose, they fly across the canvas. M. Schindler, whose lifelike portraiture of fishes has given him a world-wide reputation, and who has lived among the Sioux and painted them, has the same admiration of these savage portraitures, whose shadowy