unintelligible; and within less than a century after the Conquest, De Alva could not find more than two surviving Mexicans, both very aged, who were able to interpret the native pictorial records. Nevertheless a system of picture-writing, originating among the rude forest tribes with the simple employment of the imitative faculty in the representation of familiar objects, with their associated ideas, had advanced on this continent to the very same stage from which, in ancient Egypt, the next step was taken, resulting in the evolution of a phonetic alphabet, and so of all that is implied in letters in the largest sense. To this grand aim of ideography, or an equivalent of written speech, may, as it appears to me, be traced the earliest efforts at drawing and painting, reaching back to that strange dawn of intellectual vigour revealed to us in the graphic art of the men of Europe’s Palæolithic age. The same effort at written speech underlies all the manifestations of the artistic faculty, common alike to the semi-civilised and to the barbarous native races of this continent; and in the terms by which they express the graphic art in their various dialects, the common significance of drawing and writing is generally apparent. But the æsthetic faculty was thus stimulated into activity with results which tended to develop art in all its forms of carving, modelling, sculpture, and painting. An appreciation of colour, not merely for personal adornment, but in its artistic application—alike as a decorative art, and as the means whereby natural objects can be presented with vivid truthfulness to the eye,—is widely diffused; though the mastery of form by the modeller or sculptor long precedes that of chiaroscuro, or aerial perspective. Aboriginal painting is crude, consisting mainly of colour without tone or shading, even where the drawing is correct. But paints and dyes, both of mineral and vegetable origin, are largely in use by many Indian tribes. The Eskimo execute tasteful patterns on their skin robes in diverse colours; and the northern tribes both to the east and west of the Rocky Mountains dye porcupine quills and grasses, and with them work ornamental patterns on their dresses and in basket-work. The pottery of the Pueblo Indians is elaborately decorated in colours; and in various other ways—as in the colouring of their masks, and the painting of their boats and houses, by the Indians of Oregon and British Columbia,—the native taste for colour is manifested. Mr. Hugh Martin, in a communication of an early date to the American Philosophical Society, gives an account of the principal dyes employed by the North American Indians.[107] The Shawnees obtained a vegetable red, which they called _hau-ta-the-caugh_, from the root of a marsh plant, and largely used it in dyeing wool, porcupine quills, and the white hair of deers’ tails. From another root, the _Radix_ _flava_, a bright yellow was obtained, by mixing which with the red an orange tint is made.