In previous remarks on the main subject of this paper, the development of the artistic faculty has been noted as, in many cases, an exceptional manifestation of intellectual activity, alike in ancient and modern barbarous races. The striking contrast between the richly fluent forms of the language, and the infantile condition of this people in relation to so much else, including metallurgy, and the application of the arts generally to the practical requirements of life, furnishes a no less interesting illustration of intellectual development fostered by special influences in another direction. The habitual practice of oratory made the Iroquois acute reasoners; and their language abounds in abstract terms to a degree altogether surprising in an uncivilised race. The purposes of the rhetorician also encouraged the tropical use of literal terms. It is not, therefore, difficult to understand how the primary sense of the verb “to track” or “trace out” should ultimately yield the meaning of “drawing” or “sketching,” and so finally of “painting.” On the other hand, it abundantly coincides with the instinctive use of the imitative faculty as a means of conveying definite ideas to others, that in the Iroquois, as in other languages, the same terms are used to express the idea of making a mark, drawing, or writing. The primitive hieroglyphics, from whence our phonetic alphabets have come, were first literal drawings, and then their abbreviations employed to express associated ideas. An ideographic purpose appears to underlie the earliest efforts of imitative art. ----- [79] _Essai sur les déformations artificielles du Crâne_, p. 74. [80] _Crania Britannica_, vi. Pl. 15; xiv. Pl. 12; xxxii. Pl. 42. [81] Vide _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, 2d ed. i. 495. [82] _Trans. Ethnol. Soc._, N.S. iii. 227. [83] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, i. 495. [84] _I.e._ the Island of Santa Barbara. See “Remarks on Aboriginal Art,” in _Proc. Davenport Acad. Nat. Science_, iv. 121. [85] “The Right Hand:” _Left-handedness_, pp. 35, 37. [86] _Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot._, ix. 297, 301. [87] Vide _Prehistoric Man_, 3rd ed. ii. 54. [88] _Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific_, i. 241. [89] _Trans. Anthropol. Soc. Washington_, ii. 140. [90] _Marchand’s Voyages_, ii. 282. [91] _Remarks on Aboriginal Art in California and Queen Charlotte Islands_, p. 118. [92] _The Lenape Stone: or the Indian and the Mammoth_, by H. C. Mercer. New York, 1885, pp. 5, 17. [93] _Hommes fossiles et Hommes sauvages_, p. 49. [94] _Hommes fossiles_, etc., p. 46. [95] _Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge_, ii. 75. [96] “Aboriginal Monuments,” etc., p. 76. [97] _Proceedings of Hamilton Association_, i. 54. [98] _Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge_, xxii. 82.