[70] _Smithsonian Report_, 1572, p. 353. The important word _not_ supplied here, it is obvious from the context is absent by a mere typographical error. [71] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, vol. i., pp. 196-207. [72] _The North Americans of Antiquity_, p. 95. [73] _Prehistoric Races of the United States_, pp. 251-259. [74] _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, p. 225. [75] _Primitive Industry_, pp. 411-422. [76] _Primæval Antiquities_, p. 135. [77] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, 1st ed. 1851, p. 214; 2d ed. vol. i. [78] _Prehistoric Man_, 3rd ed. vol. i., pp. 203-228. V THE ÆSTHETIC FACULTY IN ABORIGINAL RACES THE ingenious arts of the palæolithic cave-dwellers of the Vézère abundantly prove that it needed no wanderers from the cradlelands of Old World civilisation to that strange Atlantis lying in the engirdling ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to engraft their artistic capacities on the “Achoriens” by whom it was peopled. The innate faculty for art has manifested itself in individuals and in nations, among widely diverse Assyrian, Egyptian, Hellenic, Arabian, and mediæval races, as in later Frank, Fleming, and Dane, with unaccountable partiality. For its absence, or very subordinate manifestation, is seen to be compatible with the highest intellectual triumphs in other directions. The arts of Britain’s Allophyliæ manifest no instinctive aim at a reproduction of familiar natural objects, such as is characteristic of some races at a very primitive stage. Nor was it till a recent generation that the stock from which Shakespeare and Newton sprung put forth its first efforts at rivalling the great masters of the Renaissance, or entering into competition with the skilled painters of the Low Countries. It is otherwise with the nations of the New World. The highest stage of civilisation attained there is a very partial one. But among the various characteristics of the American aborigines which invite attention, the very wide diffusion of an aptitude for imitative art is one that merits careful study as typical of American man. It is not, indeed, to be overlooked that if due allowance be made for the narrow range in degrees of civilisation among the races of the New World, the same diversity of racial characteristics is observable there as elsewhere. The tendency, moreover, of civilisation is to efface, or greatly to modify, such distinctions. Civilised nations habitually borrow the arts and imitate the social habits of neighbouring races, or accept some common standard of intellectual and moral pre-eminence. Nevertheless, while the capacity for imitative art is neither peculiar to the New World, nor characteristic of all its diverse nationalities, it appears to be more generally diffused among the races of America than elsewhere. It is prevalent among tribes in nearly every condition, from the rude Indian nomad, or the Eskimo, to the semi-civilised Zuñi, and