Appendix II. 



REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY PT)R THE 

 YEAR ENDING JUNE 30, 1893. 



Sir: I have the houor to submit the following report on the work of the Bureau 

 under my charge during the fiscal year ending June 30, 185)3. In recent years the 

 researches of the Bureau have beeu largely topic;il and carried forward along lines 

 representing the chief natural divisions ofethuologic science. The report is arranged 

 by these subjects of investigation. 



PICTOGRAPHY AND SIGN LANGUAGE. 



Researches concerning the pictography and sign language of the native American 

 tribes were continued by Col. Garrick Mallery, who spent a part of the year in 

 the held in northern New England and contiguous territory in special work among 

 the survivors of the Abnaki, Micmac, and other Algonquian tribes. The work 

 resulted in substantial additions to knowledge of the picture writing and gesture 

 speech among these people. During the greater part of the year Col. Mallery was 

 occupied in the office first in preparing and afterward in revising and correcting 

 the proof sheets of his extended repprt entitled " Picture writing of the Ameri- 

 can Indians," which forms the greater part of the tenth annual report of the 

 Bureau. This elaborate treatise is a practically exhaustive monograph on the sub- 

 ject to which it relates. The plates and text illustrations, which together comprise 

 nearly fourteen hundred figures, were collected with care and represent the aborigi- 

 nal picture writing of all portions of the country with fidelity, while the signifi- 

 cance and relations of the glyphs are discussed in detail in the text. 



During the later portion of the year, in intervals of the work of proof revising, 

 Col. Mallery continued the collection and arrangement of material relating to the 

 sign language of the American aborigines. A preliminary treatise on this subject 

 was published in one of the early reports of the Bureau; but since that time, partly 

 through the stimulus to study of the habits and customs of our native tribes afforded 

 }>y that publication, a large amount of additional material has been obtained. It is 

 the purpose to collate and discuss this material in a final monograph, which will be, 

 it is believed, even more comprehensive than that on pictography, and Col. Mallery 

 has made satisfactoy progress in this work. 



Dr. \V. J. Hoffman, who has for some years been associated with the work on pic- 

 tography and sign language, was occupied during the greater part of the year in 

 collateral researches relating to the ceremonies of a secret society (the "Grand 

 Medicine Society") of the Menonioni Indians of Wisconsin. Beginning with the 

 study of flu- pictographs and gestures of these Indians he gradually extended his 

 investigations to other characteristics of the tribe, and for three years in succession 

 attended the initiation of candidates into their most important secret society, and 

 was thus enabled to obtain the archaic linguistic forms used only in the language 

 employed in the esoteric ritual. The data collected were subsequently collated with 

 a view to publication. Sonic attention was also given to linguistic matter, includ- 

 ing gesture speech, collected among the Absaroka Indians in Montana and the Leech 

 lake band of Ojibwa Indians in Minnesota. 

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