These objects were all prehistoric. None of them bore the slightest evidence of contact with white civilization. The commoner objects would compare favorably with those found in other mounds by the same and other investigators. Much of it may be undetermined. It is strange to find so many objects brought such long distances, and we may not be able to explain the problem presented; but there is no authority for injecting any modern or European influence into it. By what people were these made? In what epoch? For what purpose? What did they represent? How did this ancient, curious, and widespread sign, a recognized symbol of religion of the Orient, find its way to the bottom of one of the mounds of antiquity in the Scioto Valley? These are questions easy to ask but difficult to answer. They form some of the riddles of the science of prehistoric anthropology. [Illustration: Fig. 254. WATER JUG WITH FIGURE OF SWASTIKA. Decoration, red on yellow ground. Poinsett County, Ark. Cat. No. 91230, U. S. N. M.] _Mounds in Arkansas._--A water jug in the collection of the U. S. National Museum (fig. 254) was obtained in 1883 by P. W. Norris, of the Bureau of Ethnology, from a mound in Poinsett County, Ark. It is of yellow ground, natural color of clay, and decorated with light red paint. The paint is represented in the cut by the darkened surfaces. The four quarters of the jug are decorated alike, one side of which is shown in the cut. The center of the design is the Swastika with the arm crossing at right angles, the ends turned to the right, the effect being produced by an enlargement on the right side of each arm until they all join the circle. A similar water jug with a Swastika mark of the same type as the foregoing decorates Major Powell's desk in the Bureau of Ethnology. Marquis Nadaillac[255] describes and figures a grooved ax from Pemberton, N. J., on which some persons have recognized a Swastika, but which the Marquis doubts, while Dr. Abbott[256] denounces the inscription as a fraud. NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. [Illustration: Fig. 255. KANSA INDIAN WAR CHART. Swastika sign for winds and wind songs. J. Owen Dorsey, American Naturalist, July, 1885, p. 670.] _The Kansas._--The Rev. J. Owen Dorsey[257] describes the mourning customs of the Kansas Indians. In the course of his description he tells of a council of ceremony held among these Indians to decide if they should go on the warpath. Certain sacred songs were sung which had been arranged according to a chart, which Mr. Dorsey introduces as pl. 20, page 676. The outside edge of this chart bore twenty-seven ideographs, which suggest or determine the song or speech required. No. 1 was the sacred pipe; No. 2, the maker of all songs; No. 3, song of another old man who gives success to the hunters; No. 4 (fig. 255 in the present paper) is the Swastika sign, consisting of two ogee lines intersecting each other, the ends curved to the left. Of it, Mr. Dorsey says only the following: