Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley | Page 6

This
animal has instead of a short, stout fore leg, terminating in flexible
fingers or paws, as indicated in the several sculptures, a shapeless
paddle-like flipper. The nails with which the flipper terminates are very
small, and if shown at all in carving, which is wholly unlikely, as being
too insignificant, they would be barely indicated and would present a

very different appearance from the distinctly marked digits common to
the several sculptures.
Noticing that one of the carvings has a differently shaped tail from the
others, the authors of the "Ancient Monuments" attempt to reconcile
the discrepancy as follows: "Only one of the sculptures exhibits a flat
truncated tail; the others are round. There is however a variety of the
lamantin (Manitus Senigalensis, Desm.) which has a round tail, and is
distinguished as the "round-tailed manitus." (Ancient Monuments, p.
252.) The suggestion thus thrown out means, if it means anything, that
the sculpture exhibiting a flat tail is the only one referable to the
manatee of Florida and southward, the M. Americanus, while those
with round tails are to be identified with the so-called "Round-tailed
Lamantin," the M. Senegalensis, which lives in the rivers of
Senegambia and along the coast of Western Africa. It is to be regretted
that the above authors did not go further and explain the manner in
which they suppose the Mound-Builders became acquainted with an
animal inhabiting the West African coast. Elastic as has proved to be
the thread upon which hangs the migration theory, it would seem to be
hardly capable of bearing the strain required for it to reach from the
Mississippi Valley to Africa.
Had the authors been better acquainted with the anatomy of the
manatees the above suggestion would never have been made, since the
tails of the two forms are, so far as known, almost exactly alike. A
rounded tail is, in fact, the first requisite of the genus Manatus, to
which both the manatees alluded to belong, in distinction from the
forked tail of the genus Halicore.
Whether the tails of the sculptured manatees be round or flat matters
little, however, since they bear no resemblance to manatee tails, either
of the round or flat tailed varieties, or, for that matter, to tails of any
sort. In many of the animal carvings the head alone engaged the
sculptor's attention, the body and members being omitted entirely, or
else roughly blocked out; as, for instance, in the case of the squirrel
given above, in which the hind parts are simply rounded off into
convenient shape, with no attempt at their delineation. Somewhat the

same method was evidently followed in the case of the supposed
manatees, only after the pipe cavities had been excavated the block was
shaped off in a manner best suited to serve the purpose of a handle.
Without, however, attempting to institute farther comparisons, two
views of a real manatee are here subjoined, which are fac-similes of
Murie's admirable photo-lithograph in Trans. London Zoological
Society, vol. 8, 1872-'74. A very brief comparison of the supposed
manatees, with a modern artistic representation of that animal, will
show the irreconcilable differences between them better than any
number of pages of written criticism.
[Illustration: Fig. 10.--Manatee (Manatus Americanus, Cuv.). Side
view.]
[Illustration: Fig. 11.--Manatee (Manatus Americanus, Cuv.). Front
view.]
There would seem, then, to be no escape from the conclusion that the
animal sculptures which have passed current as manatees do not really
resemble that animal, which is so extraordinary in all its aspects and so
totally unlike any other of the animal creation as to render its
identification in case it had really served as a subject for sculpture, easy
and certain.
As the several sculptures bear a general likeness to each other and
resemble with considerable closeness the otter, the well known
fish-eating proclivities of this animal being shown in at least two of
them, it seems highly probable that it is the otter that is rudely
portrayed in all these sculptures.
The otter was a common resident of all the region occupied by the
Mound-Builders, and must certainly have been well known to them.
Moreover, the otter is one of the animals which figures largely in the
mythology and folk-lore of the natives of America, and has been
adopted in many tribes as their totem. Hence, this animal would seem
to be a peculiarly apt subject for embodiment in sculptured form. It
matters very little, however, whether these sculptures were intended as
otters or not, the main point in the present connection being that they

cannot have been intended as manatees.
Before leaving the subject of the manatee, attention may be called to a
curious fact in connection with the Cincinnati Tablet, "of which a
wood-cut is given in The Ancient Monuments" (p. 275, Fig. 195). If the
reverse