From the _a-posteriori_ point of view--_i. e._, from the character
and appearance of the carving, there are objections which have been
considered important to the Stone's authenticity; these the writer has
carefully noted, and will allow them to speak for themselves.
First, in the opinion of Messrs. M. E. Wadsworth, of Cambridge, and
Joseph P. Iddings, of the United States Coast Survey, the carvings were
made after the Stone was broken. The fact is proved, they say, by the
appearance of certain lines crossing the fracture, as in the case of
the lightning above the hole on the right, which, when exposed to the
microscope, seem as they cross to descend into it.
Secondly, the fracture, they say, crosses the minimum number of
carvings as if they had been arranged with reference to it.
Thirdly, the mammoth on the Stone resembles the La Madeleine carving.
As to the first point--the carving being later than the fracture,--Dr.
F. W. Putnam (of the Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) observes, on
the other hand: "It is possible that an Indian might have made his
carving on a broken gorget, and there is no reason why he should have
discontinued his work if the gorget were broken during the carving,
a likely thing to happen,"--nor, we may add, need it be difficult to
suppose that the Indian would have glued the pieces together or cleaned
out the grooves crossing the fracture. In such a case the instrument
would naturally have broken somewhat into the fracture--"sinking down,"
as Dr. Wadsworth says, "and ending against the fractured portion
opposite," while the subsequent weathering and brushing might account
for the slight difference in level of the lines on either side of
the break. Again, supposing the mammoth carving to have been made
before the fracture, the carvings on the reverse of the Stone, and
the apparently meaningless scratch below the perforation, which, as
it were, skips the fracture, may have been made long after it. As Dr.
Putnam says: "The fact that a very large number of perforated stones
are broken when found is worthy of consideration, and also that in
most cases the fracture is through one of the holes." As regards the
resemblance of the mammoth on the Stone to the La Madeleine carving,
a point which after a careful examination of all the facts struck
Professor Shaler, of Harvard, as suspicious, there is certainly in the
outline of the tail and the indicisive drawing of the back a great
similarity in the treatment of the two figures; while, on the other
hand, as Dr. Charles Rau, of the Smithsonian Institute, supposes, the
resemblance may perhaps be ascribed to accident, the drawing of the
head, ear, trunk, and hair being, as he suggests, totally dissimilar.
The seeming repetition of the outline of the back in the two figures
may perhaps be looked upon as a suggestion of the mane-like ridge of
hair, which, as seen in some of the reconstructions, extended along the
back of the animal from the neck to the tail; and it may be observed
that any two profile drawings of the same animal, as realistic as the
above, would naturally possess striking points of resemblance. Dr. D.
G. Brinton, of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, objects,
in a letter above quoted to the Bucks County _Intelligencer_, that
"no lines indicating shading or rounding are found in the aboriginal
designs of pure native origin in the Eastern United States," that
in these designs grouping was unknown, and that "any such triple
arrangement as the brute, the human, and the divine groups standing in
immediate relation to each other and forming parts of a picture, was
far above aboriginal æsthetic conceptions," that "lightnings shooting
from a central point (as from the hand of Jove) were unknown to the
art-notions of the red race," and that "the treatment of the sun as
a face with rays shooting from it, I also consider foreign to the
pictography of the Delaware Indians; nor have I yet seen any specimens
proved to be of their manufacture that present it. It is found, indeed,
in Chippeway pictography, but there only in late examples."
To this we can only say that nothing is more common than "grouping" in
the pictography of our modern Western Indians, while the more ancient
pictographs of the pre-Columbian Indian, a study of which would be
necessary in forming definite opinions, as to their character, have
been almost entirely lost to us.
These were probably very rarely carved upon stone or made upon any
thing but the most perishable materials, and few have survived the
bigotry or indifference of the early settlers and explorers. Their
character is, we think, not fully represented by the meagre data
furnished us from the allusions of the early writers, the Chippeway
bark records, the "wallum olum," or the rock inscriptions now within
the student's reach, and from which we are left to draw our conclusions
as to the evolution of "grouping" or "shading," or the ability of the
Indian to treat the sun, moon, and stars, or lightning.
There could have been no great mental chasm, we think, between the
æsthetic conceptions of the modern Sioux or Comanche, who pictures a
buffalo hunt on his robe, and those of his pre-Columbian red brother,
who, as Loskiel says, painted his "bedeutende figuren" on the trees of
a Pennsylvania forest.
Domenich says, in the "History of North America," p. 426:
"We have seen painted upon bark the representation of a Chippeway
emigration, passing through rivers, forests, and mountains, on their
way from the borders of a lake to a more civilized country; above the
river were creeks and trees, symbols of forests, and tumuli indicating
mountains; finally, on top of the picture a dozen animals, totems of
the Chippeway chiefs, each with a heart in his breast."
The same author says, again: "One seldom sees a garment on which there
is not a drawing in black, yellow, red, white, or blue, representing
guns, lances, heads of hair, arrows, shields, the sun, moon, men,
horses, roads, etc., and sometimes mythological objects."
Possessed as we elsewhere find of a considerable power of delineation
of which our present extremely insufficient vestiges can give us no
adequate idea, and having already conceived the idea of a "brute,
human, and divine group" in his numerous traditions of a great monster,
the enemy of man, destroyed by divine wrath and lightnings, we can
by no means think that the ancient Delaware would have found it more
difficult than the Chippeway mentioned above, to express his conception
in a rude picture involving such a triple grouping.