410 proceedings: anthropological society 



into the white community and in many places are semicivilized and 

 losing their former crafts. Nowhere except in the museums can the 

 ethnologist get a thorough understanding of what they accomplished. 

 The Australian Museum at Sydney has immense series of all Aus- 

 tralian weapons, arborglyphs, etc., and a magnificent New Guinea 

 collection, including pottery, and bone daggers. Among American 

 things are Arkansas pottery; Peruvian figure pots, throwing sticks, 

 and celts with lance heads; and shell beads from Yucatan (received 

 from A. Bastian). The bone daggers are like those in the ear piercing 

 ceremony in the Mexican picture codices. They are said to be for 

 dispatching an enemy and are usually made from the tibia of a casso- 

 wary. The Perth Museum collection includes native string knotted 

 bags, stone implements of an early type, glass spear heads, spear throwers, 

 bull roarers, and the only known spear head of pottery; also pottery 

 from Zuni, Chiriqui, and Nicaragua, sent in exchange by the Smith- 

 sonian Institution; and ancient Patagonian arrow points, stone borers, 

 incised pottery, etc. The serrated glass spear heads of Australia 

 exhibit the highest skill and are still made for sale by natives imprisoned 

 at Broome on the northern coast. 



The Adelaide Museum has rare, rudely made native canoes, axes, 

 quartzite daggers in sheaths, stone picks used for fighting at close 

 quarters, and big stone axes a foot long; also native skulls, a Pacific 

 Islands collection with models of houses, and metal bomerangs from 

 India and West Africa. The unwieldy stone axes are very heavy 

 and were set in short handles of pliant wood split for the stone to pass 

 through and fastened with resin, as in the case of tomahawks. The 

 Melbourne Library and Museum contains Australian ceremonial 

 objects of painted wood and feather decorations somewhat similar 

 to those of the Hopi, on which Baldwin Spencer is an authority; also 

 petroglyphs, boomerangs, lillil (or waggera), shields, axes, and wedges. 

 The Kenyon and Mahony collection has 10,000 stone implements, 

 showing a great variety of types from different places. At Portland, 

 paleolithic types were found; on the Gouldbourne, chipped river peb- 

 bles; in the interior, where brittle stone implements were scarce, they 

 were used and re-used to make pigmy types. The Hobart Museum 

 has the skeleton of the last Tasmanian. This state, like the others, 

 prepared interesting handbooks that contained much information 

 about the natives for the British Association for the Advancement 

 of Science, which met in Australia in 1914. The Auckland Museum 

 of New Zealand has much Maori ornamentation. An entire house has 

 been re-erected in the great hall, the interior walls finely carved in 

 panels. Still finer are some panels and long pieces of carved wood 

 from an old house that was taken down and the carved parts buried 

 for safety during a war. Small wooden coffins shaped like fetishes 

 and painted are shown and there is a skeleton and the unfinished stone 

 axes buried with it. There are many carved ceremonial clubs, and 

 all show evidence of a high state of art formerly prevailing among . 

 the Maori. 



