ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 89 



be her only garment ; and it is still worn from old custom, but now- 

 covered b)^ a petticoat of cotton, generally made of several pocket- 

 handkerchiefs in the piece, bought from the traders. Under these 

 circumstances, it has become useless as a garment, only serving as 

 what I understand is called in the civilized world "a dress-improver ;" 

 the effect of which, indeed, the Mojave women perfectly understand, 

 and avail themselves of in the most comic manner. Suppose, now, 

 that we had no record of how this fantastic fashion came into use 

 among them : It has only to be compared with the actual wearing 

 of bark garments in Further Asia and tlie Pacific Islands in order 

 to tell its own history, — that it is a remnant of the phase of culture 

 where bark is the ordinary material for clothing. But the anthropo- 

 logist could not be justified in arguing from this bark-wearing that 

 the ancestors of the Mojaves had learned it from Asiatics. Inde- 

 pendent development, actingnot only where men's minds, but their 

 circumstances, are similar, must be credited with much of the simi- 

 larity of customs. It is curious that the best illustrations of this 

 do not come from customs which are alike in detail in two places, 

 and so may be accounted for, like the last example, by emigration 

 from one place to another. We find it much easier to deal with 

 practices similar enough to show corresponding workings of the 

 human mind, but also different enough to show separate formation. 

 Only this morning I met with an excellent instance of this. Dr. 

 Yarrow, your authority on the subject of funeral rites, described to 

 me a custom of the Utes of disposing of the bodies of men they 

 feared and hated by putting them under water in streams. After 

 much inquiry, he found that the intention of this proceeding was to 

 prevent their coming back to molest the survivors. Now, there is 

 a passage in an old writer on West Africa where it is related, that, 

 when a man died, his widow would have herself ducked in the rivei 

 in order to get rid of his ghost, which would be hanging about her, 

 especially if she were one of his most loved wives. Having thus 

 drowned him of, she was free to marry again. Here, then, is the 

 idea that water is impassable to spirits, worked out in different ways 

 in Africa and America, but showing in both the same principle ; 

 which, indeed, is manifested by so many peoples in the idea of 

 bridges for the dead to pass real or imaginary streams, from the 

 threads stretched across brooks in Burmah for the souls of friends 

 to cross by, to Catlin's slippery pine-log for the Choctaw dead to 

 pass the dreadful river. In such correspondences of principle we 



