POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



281 



-wife's parents, though on a friendly footing, 

 to speak to or look at one another, or the 

 converse custom of the wife and her hus- 

 band's relatives being obliged ceremonially 

 to cut one another, is practiced by some sev- 

 enty peoples. A marked distinction is found 

 to lie between those peoples whose custom 

 is for the husband to reside with his wife's 

 family, and those where he removes her to 

 his own home. It appears that the avoid- 

 ance custom between the husband and the 

 wife's family belongs preponderantly to the 

 group of cases where the husband goes to 

 live with his wife's family. This implies a 

 casual connection between the customs of 

 avoidance and residence, suggesting as a rea- 

 son that the husband, being an interloper in 

 the wife's family, must be treated as a 

 stranger, or not "recognized." Other va- 

 rieties of the custom show similar prepon- 

 derant adhesions. 



The American Badger. — The mammalian 

 fauna of the United States includes two 

 species of badgers — the American badger 

 {Taxidea americana americana) and the 

 Mexican badger ( T. a. berlandicri)^ the latter 

 being found on our southwestern border. Dr. 

 R. W. Shufeldt, U. S. A., says that many 

 writers have confounded our species with the 

 European badger (Mcles), though in reality 

 they are very distinct animals. The Ameri- 

 can badger is found in this country from 

 Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin westward, and 

 used to occur much further east. Dr. Shu- 

 feldt had a fine one in captivity for a long 

 time at Fort Wingate, and has seen a num- 

 ber of others there, among them being the 

 largest that he ever saw or read about. It 

 was an adult male, and measured from the 

 tip of his nose to the tip of his tail thirty- 

 two inches. Badgers take a varied diet of 

 fruit, birds' eggs, insects, frogs, small mam- 

 mals, nuts, and roots. It has not been 

 proved that the American badger is as fond 

 of honey as the European species is, and 

 generally its tastes are far more carnivorous. 

 They drink a great deal of water. They 

 spend most of the daytime in the extensive 

 burrows which their enormous fore-claws en- 

 able them to excavate, coming out to feed 

 chiefly at night. It is very rare to find a 

 pair of them together. When one has been 

 chased into its burrow it sometimes reappears 



in a moment or two at the entrance to inspect 

 its pursuer. Dr. Shufeldt has seen Indians 

 take advantage of this habit by running up 

 to the hole and killing the animal with a 

 pistol-shot as it showed its head. Few ani- 

 mals prey upon or molest the badger ; it is a 

 strong and determined fighter, and even the 

 wolf and the coyote do not care to attack 

 it. Prof. Elliott Coues, in his " Fur-bearing 

 Animals," says that "the flesh of the 

 badger, like that of the skunk, is eatable, 

 and doubtless often eaten by savage tribes, 

 though not to be recommended to a cultivated 

 palate." Dr. Shufeldt found that the speci- 

 mens which he skinned emitted during the 

 process a most rank odor. The badger 

 yields a valuable fur. Thousands of shaving- 

 brushes are said to be made annually from 

 the long hairs, from which also the " badger 

 blender" used by artists is made. The colors 

 of the badger pelt are blended gray, tawny, 

 black, and white, the colors ringed in alter- 

 nation on individual hairs. The gray pre- 

 dominates. Much remains to be observed in 

 regard to the more obscnre habits of the 

 badger. 



A Phonetic Alphabet for Indian Lan- 

 guages. — Mr. Garrick Mallery, in preparing 

 the phonetic alphabet used by the Bureau of 

 Ethnology in recording Indian languages, 

 while seeking for a distinct character for 

 every sound, made it a fundamental rule that 

 the characters should be limited to those 

 in an ordinary font of English type — in- 

 cluding with the Roman alphabet other 

 characters and diacritical marks common in 

 newspaper printers' cases. The range of 

 characters is extended by reversing those 

 letters of the Roman alphabet which look 

 markedly different when reversed. This is 

 entirely convenient to the printer, and does 

 not occasion awkwardness in the current 

 script to the recorder or writer for the press, 

 as he has only to mark the letter intended to 

 be reversed, after writing it in the normal 

 manner, and to notify the printer accord- 

 ingly. In practice, the letters intended to 

 be reversed are marked by a cross beneath 

 them. The result of this scheme in practice 

 has solved one part of the problem of a 

 universal phonetic alphabet. Vocabularies 

 and chrestomathies of unwritten languages 

 have been recorded and printed, on which 



