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In the National Museum, at Washington, the visitor as he inspects examples of American aboriginal art is astonished at its union of utility and beauty. Boat and paddle, spear and hook, basket and vase, are as admirable in form as useful in traveling, fishing, or carrying corn or water. How far an aboriginal designer may go largely turns upon what variety of resources Nature offers him. No few score families on a lonely islet of the Pacific can possibly rival the cloths and carvings displayed by tribes ranging a Pennsylvania, or a California, abounding with diverse minerals, plants and animals. When skill and invention occupy so rich a land they flower into the highest creations of aboriginal art. And yet it may be that the very fewness of a designer’s resources but spurs him to all the more ingenuity. It depends upon who the man is. As we look upon a collection of Eskimo harpoons and knives, coats and kayaks, we marvel that all these should be produced with so much excellence and variety from a scanty store of bones and teeth, sinews and hides, with but little iron or none at all.[10]

[10] Two unrivalled books on aboriginal invention have been written by Mr. Otis T. Mason, Curator of the Department of Ethnology at the National Museum, Washington:—“Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture,” New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1894; and “The Origin of Inventions,” London, Walter Scott Publishing Co., and New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1905. Both volumes are fully illustrated.

The annual reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, describe and illustrate American aboriginal art so fully and admirably as to be indispensable to the student.