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conform to the state religion, whose head laughed when it was cut off. 



Now, to find thus, in a secluded district, an old state of society 

 resisting for a time the modifying influences which have already 

 changed the world around, is no exceptional state of things. It 

 shows the very processes of resisted but eventually prevailing altera- 

 tion which anthropologists have to study over larger regions of 

 space and time in the general development of the world. In visit- 

 ing my Mennonite friends in Pennsylvania, I sometimes noticed 

 that while they thought it nothing strange that I should come to 

 study them and their history, yet when I was asked where I was 

 going next, and confessed with some modesty that I was going with 

 Major Powell to the far west to see the Zunis, this confession on my 

 part was received with a look of amazement, not quite unmingled 

 with kindly reproof; it seemed so strange to my friends that any 

 person travelling about of his own will should deliberately go to 

 look at Indians. I found it hard to refrain from pointing out that, 

 after all, there is a community of purpose between studies of the 

 course of civilization whether carried out among the colonists of 

 Pennsylvania or among the Indians of New Mexico. Investigation 

 of the lower races is made more obscure and difficult through the 

 absence of the guidance of written history, but the principle is the 

 same. 



A glance at the tribes whom Professor Mosely and I have seen in 

 the far west during the last few weeks has shown one or two results 

 which may be worth stating; and one, merely parenthetical, I 

 think I must take leave to mention, though ir, lies outside the main 

 current of my subject. 



Our look at North American Indians, of whom it has been my 

 lot to write a good deal upon second-hand evidence, had, I am 

 glad to say, a very encouraging effect ; because it showed that on 

 the whole much of the writings of old travelers and missionaries 

 have to be criticised, yet if, when carefully compared, they agree in 

 a statement, personal inspection will generally verify that statement. 

 One result of our visit has been, not a diminution, but an increase 

 of the confidence with which both of us in future will receive the 

 statements of travelers among the Indians, allowing for their often 

 being based upon superficial observation. So long as we confine 

 ourselves to things which the traveler says he saw and heard, we 

 are, I believe, upon very solid ground. 



To turn to our actual experiences. The things that one sees 



