et the
story of the Manabozhian deluge. The Red Indians have always, as far as
European knowledge goes, been in the habit of using this picture-writing
for the purpose of retaining their legends, poems, and incantations. It
is unnecessary to say that the picture-writing of Mexico and the
hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt are derived from the same savage
processes. I must observe that the hasty indications of the figure used
in picture-writing are by no means to be regarded as measures of the Red
Men's skill in art. They can draw much better than the artist who
recorded the Manabozhian legend, when they please.

In addition to picture-writing, Religion has fostered savage
representative art. If a man worships a lizard or a bear, he finds it
convenient to have an amulet or idol representing a bear or a lizard. If
one adores a lizard or a bear, one is likely to think that prayer and
acts of worship addressed to an image of the animal will please the
animal himself, and make him propitious. Thus the art of making little
portable figures of various worshipful beings is fostered, and the craft
of working in wood or ivory is born. As a rule, the savage is satisfied
with excessively rude representations of his gods. Objects of this
kind--rude hewn blocks of stone and wood--were the most sacred effigies
of the gods in Greece, and were kept in the dimmest recesses of the
temple. No Demeter wrought by the craft of Phidias would have appeared
so holy to the Phigalians as the strange old figure of the goddess with
the head of a mare. The earliest Greek sacred sculptures that remain are
scarcely, if at all, more advanced in art than the idols of the naked
Admiralty Islanders. But this is anticipating; in the meantime it may be
said that among the sources of savage representative art are the need of
something like writing, and ideas suggested by nascent religion.

[Fig. 9. Bushman Wall-Painting: 295.jpg]

The singular wall-picture (Fig. 9) from a cave in South Africa, which we
copy from the 'Cape Monthly Magazine,' probably represents a magical
ceremony. Bushmen are tempting a great water animal--a rhinoceros, or
something of that sort--to run across the land, for the purpose of
producing rain. The connection of ideas is scarcely apparent to
civilised minds, but it is not more indistinct than the connection
between carrying a bit of the rope with which a man has been hanged and
success at cards--a common French superstit