With the American use of pictographic robes may be compared the following account of the same use by Australian natives by Dr. Richard Andree (b).
The inner side of the opossum skins worn by the blacks is also often ornamented with figures. They scratch lines into the skin, which afterward are rubbed over with fat and charcoal.
FEATHERS AND QUILLS.
Edward M. Kern, in Schoolcraft (f), reports that the Sacramento tribes of California were very expert in weaving blankets of feathers, many of them having beautiful figures worked upon them.
The feather work in Mexico, Central America, and the Hawaiian Islands is well known, often having designs properly to be considered among pictographs, though in modern times not often passing beyond ornamentation.
Worsnop (op. cit.) mentions that on grand occasions of the “Mindarie” (i. e., peace festival) the Australian natives decorate the bodies, face, legs, and feet with the down of wild fowl, stuck on with their own blood. The ceremony of taking the blood is very painful, yet they stand it without a murmur. It takes five or six men four to five hours to decorate one man. The blood is put on the body wet and the down stuck on the blood, showing, when finished, outlines of man’s head, face, feet, snakes, emu, fish, trees, birds, and other outlines representing the moon, stars, sun, and Aurora Australis, the whole meaning that they are at peace with the world.
Mr. David Boyle (a) gives an account of a piece of porcupine quill work, with an illustration, a part of which is copied in Fig. 158.
Fig. 158.—Quill pictograph.
Among the lost or almost lost arts of the Canadian Indians is that of employing porcupine quills as in the illustration. Partly on account of scarcity of material, but chiefly, it is likely, from change of habits and of taste, there are comparatively few Indian women now living who attempt to produce any fabric of this kind. * * *