Dr. Abbott, who, in his "Prehistoric Industry," has given a wood-cut of the curious egg-shaped stone found at Lake Winnipissiogee, and upon which there are several carvings of spears, quotes in the same work, by way of the nearest approach to an allusion to the spear among the early writers, a description from Josselyn of an elk-hunt among the early Massachusetts Indians, in which the writer describes a lance made of a staff a yard and a half long and pointed with fish-bone. But a passage in Bernal Diaz del Castillo ("Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la nueva Espana," Madrid, 1638), kindly pointed out to the writer by Dr. Rau, seems to furnish conclusive evidence on the subject. Bernal Diaz, among several instances in his works, speaks (chapter vi.) of an attack upon the Spaniards in Florida by Indians "armed with immense-sized bows, sharp arrows, and spears, among which some were shaped like swords" ("y lanzas y unas ā manera de espadas").
Furthermore there is fig. 5 (plate xiv. from De Bry's "Brevis Narratio," published in Latin in Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1591), representing Indians holding spears, for which likewise the writer is indebted to Dr. Rau. It was drawn from life by one Jacques Le Moyne, a French artist, in 1564. He had come to Florida with the French Admiral Laudonnière, and having been left by the expedition for some months at a fort upon the St. John's River, frequently made sketching expeditions among the neighboring tribes. Many similar drawings by him of warriors armed with spears are to be found among the numerous illustrations in De Bry.
Fig. 5.—Picture of North American Indians carrying spears, drawn from life by Jacques Le Moyne, in 1564.
Passing over the mysterious animal on one of the Davenport tablets, sometimes taken for a mammoth, and the pictograph on a boulder near the Gila River seen by Colonel W. H. Emory in 1846 in a military reconnaissance,[F] and which, he says, "may with some stretch of the imagination be supposed to be a mastodon," we come to the supposed traces of the elephant noticed by numerous writers in the mural paintings and architecture of Mexico and Central America.
Fig. 6.—Elephant Trunk (Uxmal).
Figures 6 and 7, reduced from Catherwood's "Atlas" to Stephens' "Yucatan," are fair specimens of the remarkable architectural ornaments from Central America known as elephant trunks, and which, placed between two eyes and a mouth-like cavity, seem at first, as Waldeck and other travellers have remarked, to bear a striking resemblance to the trunk of a proboscidean.
Figure 6 is from the gateway of the great Teocallis at Uxmal, and 7 from that of the Casa de las Monjos at Uxmal; as in the case of all the other "elephant trunks," however, they offer no suggestion of the prominent tusks of the American elephant, and, as Dr. F. W. Putnam maintains, should perhaps be looked upon as grotesque representations of the human race, of which the so-called trunk forms the nose.
