The decoration of domestic pottery by the American Indian workers in clay is greatly developed among the more southern tribes. The ornamentation of a few prominent points, moulded more or less rudely into human or animal heads, gives place with them to the modelling of the vessel itself into animal forms, or to its decoration, chiefly with human or animal figures. Among the examples of native art in the National Museum at Washington are two large vases, remarkable for their elaborate workmanship, which were brought from Mexico, by General Alfred Gibbs. They are figured, along with other specimens of Mexican pottery and terra-cottas, in Mr. Charles Rau’s account of the Archæological Collection of the United States National Museum. They are there spoken of as “two large vases of exquisite workmanship,” and one of them is not only described as an admirable specimen of Mexican pottery, but it is added: “As far as the general outline is concerned, it might readily be taken for a vessel of Etruscan or Greek origin. The peculiar ornamentation, however, stamps it at once as a Mexican product of art:”[98] and, it may be added, in doing so, places it in very marked contrast to any example of Etruscan or Greek workmanship. Its modelling, both in general form and in all its curious zoomorphic details, is essentially barbarous, yet manifesting ingenious skill in the workmanship, and exuberant fancy in design. The influence of Mexican art extended northward; and its characteristics may be traced in much of the native pottery of the Southern States. But throughout Mexico, Central America, and the Isthmus, the modeller in clay appears to have revelled in feats of skill. Clay masks and caricatures, and heads of men and animals, in endless variety of dress and fashioning, abound. Utility is in many cases rendered altogether subsidiary to the sports of fancy. Musical instruments are made in the form of animals; and vases and earthenware vessels of every kind are modelled in imitation of vegetables, fruit, and shells, or decorated with familiar natural objects. This is still more apparent in Peruvian pottery, where an unrestrained exuberance of fancy sports with the pliant clay. Animal and vegetable forms are combined. Men and women are represented in their daily avocations, as porters, water-carriers, etc. Portrait-vases represent the human head, characterised at times by grace and beauty; but more frequently grotesquely caricatured. The human head surmounts the lithe body of the monkey, sporting in ape-like antics; melons and gourds have animal heads for spouts; while the duck, parrot, toucan, pelican, turkey, crane, land-turtle, lynx, otter, deer, llama, cayman, shark, toad, etc., are ingeniously reproduced, singly or in groups, as models for bottles, jars, or pitchers. The double or triple goblets, and two-necked bottles or jugs, acquire a fresh interest from resemblances traceable between some of them and others belonging to distant