The significance of the looped figure which forms so prominent a feature in the designs in question has not been determined. I would offer the suggestion, however, that, from the manner of its occurrence, it may represent an inclosure, a limit, or boundary. It may be well to point out the fact that a similar looped rectangle occurs several times in the ancient Mexican manuscripts. One example, from the Vienna Codex,[142] is presented in Fig. 5, Plate LIX. It is not a little remarkable that a cross occupies the inclosed area in all these examples.

PL. LIX—THE BIRD.

1. Shell gorget from stone grave, Tenn.
2. Shell gorget from stone grave, Tenn.
3. Shell gorget from stone grave, Tenn.
4. Bone implement, N. J.
5. Design from Aztec painting.

I shall close this very hasty review of the bird in the art of the Mound Builders by presenting the remarkable example of shell carving shown in Fig. 1, Plate LX. Like so many of the National Museum specimens, it is practically without a record—a stray. It is labeled "B. Pybas, Tuscumbia, Ala." It is old and fragmentary, the shell substance being, however, quite well preserved. It is the right-hand half of a gorget which represents an eagle's head in profile. The skill of the ancient artist is shown to great advantage; nothing can be found, even in the most elaborately carved pipes, equal to the treatment of this remarkable head. To overcome the difficulty of cutting the flinty and massive shell was no small triumph for a people still in the stone age. To conceive and execute such a graphic work is a still more marvelous achievement.[143] The lines of the mandibles and protruding tongue are strongly and correctly drawn. The eye and the markings of the head are executed in smooth, deeply incised lines, and are conventionalized in a manner peculiar to the American aborigines.

PL. LX—THE BIRD.

1. Fragment of shell gorget, Alabama. (1/1)
2. Gold ornament, Florida. (1/2)
3. Head of ivory-billed-woodpecker.

THE SPIDER.

Among insects the spider is perhaps best calculated to attract the attention of the savage. The tarantula is in many respects a very extraordinary creature, and is endowed with powers of the most deadly nature, which naturally places it along with the rattlesnake in the category of creatures possessing supernatural attributes. Its curiously constructed house with the hinged door and smoothly plastered chamber must ever elicit the admiration of the beholder. But the spider, which spins a web and projects in mid-air a gossamer structure of marvelous symmetry and beauty, and builds an ambush from which to spring upon his prey, was probably one of the first instructors of adolescent man, and must have seemed to him a very deity. It is not strange, therefore, that the spider appears in the myths of the savages. With the great Shoshone family, according to Professor Powell, the spider was the first weaver, and taught that important art to the fathers. The Cherokees, in their legend of the origin of fire, "represent a portion of it as having been brought with them and sacredly guarded. Others say that after crossing wide waters they sent back for it to the Man of Fire from whom a little was conveyed over by a spider in his web."[144]