Such a perpetuation of a tribal peculiarity has been aptly called an ethnic survival.  Some of the advanced linguists of the present day are beginning to query whether the group of modern languages of the Aryan family are not examples of such ethnic survival; whether the differences between French and Italian and Spanish, Latin, Greek and Slavonic, are not due to the difficulty various ancient tribes found in learning to speak the same new and foreign language.  To draw an example of ethnic survival from another field of science, consider the art of the French cave men.  The archaeologist finds in the caverns bones of various mammals, teeth of cave bear, and antlers of reindeer carved with animal figures.  The art is good for a barbarous people, but it is certainly barbarian art.  The range of designs is quite great:  horses, bears, mammoths, reindeer, are among the figures.  The people who did this work were an artistic people.  To carve and represent animal forms was almost a mania with them.  An ethnic impulse seems to have driven them on to such work, just as a similar impulse drives the Haida slate carver to-day; just as a similar impulse has driven the Bushman to cover the walls of his caves in South Africa with pictures whose boldness and fidelity are the amazement of all who see them.

We have, then, in the French cave dwellers a people who had a well defined art, and who, as art workers, were isolated and unlike all neighbors.  An eminent English scientist believes that neither they nor their art are gone.  There is a people who to-day lives much as a cave man of France lived so long ago, who hunts and fishes as he did, who dresses as he did, who builds houses in whose architecture some think they can see evidence of a cavern original, who above all still carves batons from ivory, and implements from bone, adorning them with skillfully cut figures of animals and scenes from the chase.  This people is the Eskimo.  If Dawkins’ view is true, we have in the Eskimo carvings of to-day a true ethnic survival—­an outcropping of the same passion which displayed itself in the mammoth carving of La Madelaine.

Scarcely anything in the range of American antiquities has caused more wonder and led to more discussion than the animal mounds of Wisconsin.  We do not pretend to explain their purpose.  Perhaps they were village guardians; perhaps tribal totems marking territorial limits; some may have been of use as game drives; some may even have served as fetich helpers in the hunt, like the prey gods of Zuni.  We may never know their full meaning.  It is sufficient here for me to remind you what they are and where.  They are nearly confined to a belt of moderate width stretching through Wisconsin and overlapping into Minnesota and Iowa.  Within this area they occur by hundreds.  Dr. Lapham published a great work on the effigy mounds in 1855, in which he gave the results of many accurate surveys and described many interesting localities.