45 



and started to leave, but to my great surprise she got up and was soon 

 posing for the photograph. Her only tools were a flat stone, a bottom- 

 less bowl-shaped basket, which sat upon the rock, a flat circular piece of 

 basketry and a stone pestle. She sat upon the ground holding the 

 basket in place with her legs and pounded the acorns most industriously 

 with the pestle. Every once in a while the meal would be placed on 

 the disc and tossed vigorously up and down on it. The finer oily 

 parts were retained in the meshes, the coarser particles bounced back 

 into the mortar and were reground. With infinite patience these 

 processes were repeated from seven to ten times, until the meal was held 

 so tenaciously by the disc that it had to be knocked off by rei^eated 

 blows with a stick. 



The extraction of the bitter principle is carried out by placing the 

 meal in a leaf-lined depression in the sand and pouring boiling water 

 upon it. The meal is thus ])urified. The top part is removed for 

 bread. The remainder is transferred to a water-tight basket with 

 some water in it, and the meal is rapidly cooked by placing hot stones in 

 the basket. Any sand transferred to the basket settles to the bottom 

 and does not contaminate the mush. The meal reserved for bread is 

 often mixed with 5% of a special ferruginous clay and baked at a low 

 temperature over night. The iron oxide removes the remainder of the 

 tannin, and the slow cooking and, possibly, enzymic action converts 

 some of the starch into sugar. It is a very great surprise to find that 

 the bread is thus converted from a tasteless or slightly bitter dough to a 

 decidedly sweet but very dark cheese-like bread. This is very highly 

 prized, even above cake, by both Indians and some white people. 



Several of these processes are certainly very novel and worthy of 

 being patented. They present the Indian in a new light as an ingenious 

 inventor, well worthy of study by the chemists of the Chemical Founda- 

 tion, or by anv other person scientifically inclined. In most of these 

 operations the Indians antedate the chemists by perhaps many hundreds 

 of years. 



