In the matter of writing, these races were moving toward success, and had their isolation been maintained they would in time have come to the full measure. As it was, the Mayas[38] had reached a considerable degree of efficiency, and the Aztecs were following close. The more northern stocks, however, had not passed beyond the elementary stage. In the sense in which artists now use the word “drawing,” it hardly existed anywhere on this continent; that is, there was little exactness and delicacy of delineation, but it was mainly an offhand representation of objects in a barbaric fashion. There was considerable merit in some of the work executed by the sculptors, but it was nevertheless as a whole aboriginal and primitive. In the middle region the drawings and rock peckings[39] have no artistic merit whatever, and are like the work of little children; nor are the Eskimo efforts much better. The Eastern States do not afford the same abundance of characters pecked and scratched, and sometimes painted on the rocks, that exists in the Rocky Mountain region, and particularly in the South-west, where they are found everywhere.[40] This may be due to the more verdant nature of the eastern part of the country, and also to the fact that the broad, smooth surfaces of sandstone exposed so universally in the South-west are generally absent in the East. Another reason may be that the Amerinds of the various Pueblo stocks and allied tribes were more given to inscribing the rocks in this manner. Certain it is that wherever evidences exist of the former occupation of a locality by Amerinds of the Pueblo kind, there rocks will be found covered with markings and paintings. These people went everywhere in their region, and they generally left some record on the rocks, as they do to-day. If one thinks he has found a place where they did not arrive in that vast land of cliffs and canyons, he is sure soon to be undeceived. Once I reached a little platform on the face of a cliff in Arizona by hard scrambling, part of the way through a narrow crevice, and as I stood viewing the valley a thousand feet below, I thought, “Now, at last, I am on a spot where the Shinumo[41] never stood.” As I turned to make my way down again I was confronted by a lot of pictographs spread across the whole of the smooth wall behind. Thus it was almost everywhere: in the deep gorges of the Colorado River, in its side canyons, in the cliffs above and around, and all along Green River, at least as far north as the lower end of Split-Mountain canyon, these pictures occur. The climate is dry, and there is little change from one century’s end to another.[42] Some are comparatively recent, while others, even some of the painted ones, are old; how old it is impossible to estimate, but many of them are found in regions where no Amerinds of the Pueblo type[43] have lived within historical times, or within the memory of those Amerinds who now occupy the region.