1890.] NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIEN-CES. 39 



November 17tb, 1890. 



Stated Meeting. 



The President, Dr. Newberry, in the chair. 



About ten persons present. 



The minutes of November 10th were read and approved. 



Dr. Bolton nominated as Kesident Member 



Sydney A. Smith, A.B. 



Dr. Frederick Staur read the paper announced for the 

 evening, entitled 



SOME WINNEBAGO ARTS. 



(Abstract.) 



It is well known that a tribe may have peculiarities in speech, 

 in manners, in arts, that distinguish it at once from its neigh- 

 bors. The Haida carves slate as no other tribe does. The 

 elegant blankets of mountain sheep wool from Chilcat are char- 

 acteristic. The Hebrews tested the enemy with the word shib- 

 holeth, and found that he could only say sihholeth. A twist of 

 the tongue in i)ronouncing a word is a small matter, but, small 

 as it is, it may be perpetuated for ages. 



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 tiie 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 cer- 

 tainly 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 repre- 

 sent 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 



