34° POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



throve fur-bearing creatures in great variety, coveted by the titled and 

 fashionable in the Eastern Hemisphere. The trader brought along 

 with him the gun and the curved knife, with which men built better 

 canoes and women cut the finest leather, called babiche. Eesult : better 

 boats for water travel, better snow-shoes for snow travel and also better 

 men and women. But primarily, after all, conditions were hard and 

 starvation was not unknown. 



The sleds of the birch-canoe region have no runners; they are boats 

 to move on the snow. In the fur trade the dog became exalted through 

 external stimulus, and the voyageurs were known as the hardiest of 

 men. 



In the realm of the aesthetic, however, through all the birch bark 

 area men knocked at the door of Nature in vain. The fine art of both 

 sexes was in ephemeral costume decorated with porcupine quills. No 

 pottery, basketry, woodwork, stonework, earthwork or fine carving 

 of any kind existed. Since the art faculty and the materials are always 

 exalted mutually, it is in vain to enquire whether the one or the 

 other was lacking. 



The north Atlantic area. 



The drainage of the St. Lawrence, the Appalachian mountains, and 

 the Atlantic slope together formed the culture area for two powerful 

 Indian families, the Iroquoian and the Algonquian. The annual round 

 of varied employments, in peace and in war, developed a fine breed 

 of men. Cultivation of maize by the women, added to their zootechnic 

 activities, trained their wits in economy and cooperation. They were 

 not excellent potters or weavers, however, and their advancement was 

 far behind that of the men. Matriarchy was breaking down at the 

 period of the Discovery. The early records of these two families 

 abound in accounts of long journeys, of masterful enterprises, of con- 

 certed activities, of imposing councils, of treaties and alliances, 

 which go to show that the Atlantic slope long ago could produce noble 

 men. 



The Mississippi valley area. 



Between the Blue Eidge mountains and the Rockies, when the his- 

 torian arrived, two contending cultures had been at work, evoked by 

 the kingdoms of nature — that of the buffalo and that of the prairie. As 

 the land of Egypt is the residuum of a continuous warfare between the 

 desert dust and the Nile fioods, so the phenomenon of roving tribes liv- 

 ing on the sites of mounds and earthworks, of which they had neither 

 knowledge nor tradition, was the outcome of the confiict between the 

 hunting Dakotans and their congeners on the one side and the agricul- 

 tural builders of mounds from the south. 



