It is more natural to suppose, so far, at least as the North American
Indians are concerned, that the road to conventionalism has always led
through imitation.

The argument, therefore, that because a tribe or people is less given
than another to conventional methods of art, it therefore must
necessarily be in a higher stage of culture, is entitled to much less
weight than it has sometimes received. Squier and Davis, for instance,
referring to the Mound-Builders, state that "many of these (_i.e._,
sculptures) exhibit a close observance of nature such as we could only
expect to find among a people considerably advanced in the minor arts,
and to which the elaborate and laborious, but usually clumsy and
ungraceful, not to say unmeaning, productions of the savage can claim
but a slight approach."

It is clearly not the intention of the above authors to claim an entire
absence of the grotesque method of treatment in specimens of the
Mound-Builder's art, since elsewhere they call attention to what appears
to be a caricature of the human face, as well as to the disproportionate
size of the heads of many of the animal carvings. Not only are the heads
of many of the carvings of disproportionate size, which, in instances
has the effect of actual distortion, but in not a few of the sculptures
nature, instead of being copied, has been trifled with and birds and
animals show peculiarities unknown to science and which go far to prove
that the Mound-Builders, however else endowed, possessed lively
imaginations and no little creative fancy.

Decided traces of conventionalism also are to be found in many of the
animal carvings, and the method of indicating the wings and feathers of