. How are they to know
whether, according to the marriage laws of their race, they are lawful
mates for each other? This important question is settled by an
inspection of their tattooed marks. If a Thlinkeet man of the Swan
stock meets an Iroquois maid of the Swan stock they cannot speak to
each other, and the 'gesture-language' is cumbrous. But if both are
tattooed with the swan, then the man knows that this daughter of the
swan is not for him. He could no more marry her than Helen of Troy
could have married Castor, the tamer of horses. Both are children of
the Swan, as were Helen and Castor, and must regard each other as
brother and sister. The case of the Thlinkeet man and the Iroquois
maid is extremely unlikely to occur; but I give it as an example of
the practical use, among savages, of representative art.

Among the uses of art for conveying intelligence we notice that even
the Australians have what the Greeks would have called the ~skytale~,
a staff on which inscriptions, legible to the Aborigines, are
engraven. I believe, however, that the Australian ~skytale~ is not
usually marked with picture-writing but with notches--even more
difficult to decipher. As an example of Red Indian picture-writing we
publish a scroll from Kohl's book on the natives of North America.
This rude work of art, though the reader may think little of it, is
really a document as important in its way as the Chaldaean clay tablets
inscribed with the record of the Deluge. The coarsely-drawn figures
recall, to the artist's mind, much of the myth of Manabozho, the
Prometheus and the Deucalion, the Cain and the Noah of the dwellers by
the great lake. Manabozho was a great chief, who had two wives that
quarrelled. The two stumpy half-figures (4) represent the wives; the
mound between them is the displeasure of Manabozho. Further on (5) you
see him caught up between two trees--an unpleasant fix, from which the
wolves and squirrels refused to extricate him. The kind of pyramid
with a figure at top (8) is a mountain, on which, when the flood came,
Manabozho placed his grandmother to be out of the water's way. The
somewhat similar object is Manabozho himself, on the top of his
mountain. The animals you next behold (10) were sent out by Manabozho
to ascertain how the deluge was faring, and to carry messages to his
grandmother. This scroll was drawn, probably on birch bark, by a Red
Man of literary attainments, who gave it to Kohl (in its lower
right-