The necessity which, to a large extent, determined the material of the ancient workers in bone and ivory, was favourable to the development of the imitative faculty. The ingenious ivory and bone carvings of the Tawatins and other tribes of British Columbia, of the Thlinkets of Alaska, and the Eskimo, equally suffice, with the examples of European palæolithic art, to show how favourable such material was to the development of artistic feeling, which must have lain dormant had the artificers been limited to flint and stone. The same influence may be seen in operation in many stages of art: as in massive but bald Gothic structures, such as St. Machar’s Cathedral on the Dee, where the builders were limited to granite, while contemporary architecture in localities where good sandstone or limestone abounds is rich in elaborate details; and, where the soft and easily wrought Caen stone is available, runs to excess in the florid exuberance of its carvings. The ingenious artist of the Palæolithic era not only ornamented the hafts of his tools and weapons with representations of familiar objects of the chase, but is also accredited with carving, on his mace or baton, symbolic emblems expressing the rank and official duties of the owner. The analogous practice of the Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands at the present day shows that there is nothing inconsistent with primitive thought in the symbolic, significance assigned to some of the carved batons; and, if so, we have there examples of imitative art employed in a way which involved the germ of ideographic graving or picture-writing. The mere fact of pictorial imitation implies the interpretation of its representations. Eskimo implements are to be seen in various collections, as at Copenhagen and Stockholm, in the British Museum, in those of San Francisco and the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, ornamented with representations of adventures incident to their habits of life. An Arctic collection, presented by Captain Beechy to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, furnishes interesting illustrations of the skill of the Eskimo draughtsman. The carvings and linear drawings represent, for the most part, incidents in the life of the polar hunter; and this is so effectively done that, as Captain Beechy says: “By comparing one with another, a little history was obtained which gave us a better insight into their habits than could be elicited from any signs or intimations.”[88] Mr. W. H. Dall figures in his _Alaska and its Resources_, analogous examples of Innuit or Western Eskimo art; and in an interesting communication by Dr J. W. Hoffman to the Anthropological Society of Washington, on Eskimo pictographs as compared with those of other American aborigines, he figures and interprets similar examples.[89] One of these, copied from an ivory bow used in making fire, which he examined in the Museum of the Alaska Commercial Company of San Francisco, depicts three incidents in the Innuit hunter’s experience.