The interpretations thus furnished by a careful study of the carvings of the Haidahs and other artistic native tribes of British Columbia, and the evidence of a specific meaning and application discoverable in their most conventional designs, have a significant hearing on the study of analogous productions of the cave-men of Europe’s palæolithic dawn. The manifestations of an active imitative faculty and some degree of artistic skill, among different rude native tribes of this continent, present some striking parallels to the æsthetic aptitudes of the primeval draughtsmen and carvers of Europe. There are, moreover, undoubted resemblances in style and mode of representation of the objects, as depicted on some of the ancient and the modern bone and ivory carvings and drawings of the two continents; but the latter exhibit no evidence of progress. The Innuit and Eskimo designs do, indeed, more nearly approximate to those of the primitive draughtsmen than other aboriginal efforts; but their inferiority in all respects is equally striking and indisputable. The evidence of artistic ability in the native races both of Central and Southern America is abundant; nor is the northern continent lacking in its specially artistic race. But the achievements of the ancient Mayas, Peruvians, or Mound-Builders, are of very recent date, compared with the palæolithic, or even the neolithic productions of Europe. It need not, therefore, excite our wonder to find American antiquaries welcoming a disclosure, only too strikingly analogous to the famous mammoth drawing of the La Madeleine cave. There recently issued from the American press a tastefully printed volume, in which its author, Mr. H. C. Mercer, gives an account of the discovery, near Doylestown, Pennsylvania, of a “gorget stone” of soft shale, on which is graven what the author describes as “unquestionably a picture of a combat between savages and the hairy mammoth. The monster, angry, and with erect tail, approaches the forest, in which through the pine-trunks are seen the wigwams of an Indian village.” The sun, moon, and the forked lightning overhead, complete a design which could scarcely deserve serious notice, so palpable is the evidence of the fabrication, were it not for the unmistakable sincerity with which the author sets forth the narration, and assures us that after the most careful inquiry “nothing has occurred to shake his faith in the unimpeachable evidence of an honest discovery.”[92] The figure of the mammoth has a suspiciously near resemblance, in all but one respect, to the La Madeleine graving on mammoth ivory. It charges its assailants with lowered trunk and erect tail; but instead of presenting, as in the ancient cave-dweller’s drawing, evidence of aptitude in the free use of the pencil or graving tool, the scratchings on the Lenape Stone are crude and inartistic, even if tried by the rudest standard of Indian art. It may, perhaps, be worth