The figures shown in the dry-paintings are conventionalized representations of the characters in Navaho mythology and of incidents in the myth. With how many such paintings the Navaho medicine-men are familiar is an unanswered question; but more than sixty have been noted, some of them most elaborate. In making them, the ground within the ceremonial hogán is evenly covered with fine brown earth, upon which the figures are drawn with fine sands and earths of many colors allowed to flow between the thumb and the first two fingers. The Navaho become so skilled in this work that they can draw a line as fine as a broad pencil mark. Many of the paintings are comparatively small, perhaps not more than four feet in diameter; others are as large as the hogán permits, sometimes twenty-four feet across. To make such a large painting requires the assistance of all the men who can conveniently work at it from early morning until mid-afternoon. The most elaborate ceremonies are conducted between the first frost of autumn and the second moon following the winter solstice. While primarily designed to restore the health of an individual, they are intended also to benefit the entire tribe, many of the prayers being offered for the general welfare of the people rather than for the patient under immediate treatment. Nor, so far as the individual is concerned, is the ceremony designed necessarily for the cure of an acute ailment, but is for the treatment of long-standing chronic afflictions, mental or physical. Especially peculiar is the Navaho belief that many illnesses are the results of fright to which ancestors have been subjected during prenatal life, and long and costly ceremonies are often performed to rid persons of such baneful inheritance. In fact Indians physically normal have submitted to prolonged treatment by their medicine-men when advised by them for such imaginative reasons to submit to it.