one that
have been brought from these ruins hang pictures of the entire building
or city, so that the visitor's memory is refreshed, and he is enabled to
place the relics in their proper relation to the whole.

In regard to the remarkable remains of the ancient "cliff-dwellers," who
inhabited the canons along the south-western boundary of Colorado, and
are considered the ancestors of the pueblo-building Indians whose
terraced community-houses crown isolated buttes in the midst of the
Arizona deserts and along the Rio Grande, a more effective mode of
representation has been adopted. Upon several of the large hall-tables
will be seen, under glass, models in plaster, colored with exactness, of
those great houses and all their externals. These models were made by
Messrs. Jackson and Holmes, of the United States Geological Survey, and
are wonderfully truthful and instructive. A similar plan has been
adopted in a few other cases to show savage architecture, and it has
proved so effective and interesting that its use should be extended. The
little model of a lacustrine village restored from the vestiges
discovered in the Swiss lakes gives one a better notion of how the
lake-dwellers really conducted their peaceful life and guarded
themselves against their savage enemies of the forest and mountains
than any amount of verbal description could do.

Beyond any one of these in importance as a source of mementos
illustrating the life and art of the aborigines is the burial-place. Not
only do well-recognized graves and cemeteries yield valuable material
whenever explored, but a large part of that gathered in ploughed fields
and on ancient town-sites was undoubtedly put there with the dead, or as
a subsequent offering. Nothing is more fortunate for the science of
archaeology than that the primitive Americans held the notions they did
respecting death and the hereafter; for through these theories and the
practices to which they gave rise an enormous amount of material has
been preserved to us which otherwise would have been lost. It is not too
much to say, I feel sure, that were all other traces of prehistoric
America obliterated from our knowledge and possession save that which
has been and may be derived from burial-places, we might still
reconstruct nearly as complete a picture as can now be outlined.

The modes of disposal of the dead were various among the native races of
America, and most of them may be matched by customs obtai