Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley - Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the - Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880-81, - Government Printing Office, Washington, 1883, pages 117-166 by Henry W. (Henry Wetherbee) Henshaw
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page 14 of 64 (21%)
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be found in Wilson's Prehistoric Man, vol. i, p. 476, Fig. 22. Another
of the supposed lamantins, Fig. 9, is taken from Squier's article in the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, vol. ii, p. 188. A bad print of the same wood-cut appears as Fig. 153, p. 251, of the "Ancient Monuments." It should be noted that the physiognomy of Fig. 6, above given, although unquestionably of an otter, agrees more closely with the several so-called manatees, which are represented without fishes, than with the fish-bearing otter, first mentioned, Fig. 4. Fig. 6 thus serves as a connecting link in the series, uniting the unmistakable otter, with the fish in its mouth, to the more clumsily executed and less readily recognized carvings of the same animal. [Illustration: Fig. 8.--Lamantin or sea-cow of Squier and Davis.] [Illustration: Fig. 9.--Lamantin or sea-cow of Squier.] It was doubtless the general resemblance which the several specimens of the otters and the so-called manatees bear to each other that led Stevens astray. They are by no means facsimiles one of the other. On the contrary, while no two are just alike, the differences are perhaps not greater than is to be expected when it is considered that they doubtless embody the conceptions of different artists, whose knowledge of the animal, as well as whose skill in carving, would naturally differ widely. Recognizing the general likeness, Stevens perhaps felt that what one was all were. In this, at least, he is probably correct, and the following reasons are deemed sufficient to show that, whether the several sculptures figured by one and another author are otters or not, |
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