Sixteenth Annual Meeting. 31 



formed me that the day after I left, a delegation from the pueblo, with their priest, had 

 waited upon him for the purpose of ransoming their lost god. It seemed that it had 

 been missed almost as soon as taken, and that the thief, as soon as his spree was over, 

 had become anxious on account of his conduct, and confessed his guilt, and directed them 

 where to find t heir missing deity. When they were told it had been carried away by a 

 stranger into a strange land, they expressed extreme regret, and appeared to be greatly 

 affected over their loss. 



The image is worked out of dark-green quartz syenite. The Pueblos, from whom it 

 was obtained, did not make it, nor had they any knowledge or notion as to its origin, so 

 far as I could learn. They only knew that it bad passed down from one to another for 

 many generations, and that for a long time it had had a place in their local traditions as 

 a thing to be revered. I do not wish to be understood as placing any especial importance 

 upon the place that this object occupied in the Pueblo village. I do not know that they 

 have a well-defined system of idol worship. Their original traditions and forms of wor- 

 ship have become so peculiarly mixed and amalgamated with a degenerate and renegade 

 Catholicism, that it is dillieul* to determine how much is one and how much the other. 

 This much, however, is certain: they are filled with superstition, and prone to worship, 

 more in fear than from any other incentive, any object or natural phenomenon that ap- 

 pears to them strange or unnatural. The object to which this brief paper refers is the 

 work of another and an earlier people, from whose mysterious, disputed, "half concealed 

 and half revealed" existence this little image derives its interest. I presume it was 

 found by some of these Indians, perhaps many centuries ago. Its appearance was such 

 as to awaken their curiosity, and not being able to account for its occurrence, and not 

 knowing what should be done with such a looking thing, the natural propensity — not 

 yet wholly extinct in the human species — to be on the safe side, prompted them to as- 

 sign to ita niche in their fantastic hierarchy. 



OBSERVATIONS OF THE BREEDING HABITS OF THE AMERICAN 



EARED GREBES. 

 (Dytes nigricottis californicus.) 



BY N. S. GOSS. 



June 4th, 1877, I had the pleasure of finding about one hundred pairs of the birds 

 nesting in a little cove of Como Lake, a small alkali lake without outlet, in the Terri- 

 tory of Wyoming, on the line of the Union Pacific Railway — altitude 6,680 feet — nests 

 in a narrow strip of rushes growing in water eighteen inches deep, and about one hun- 

 dred and thirty feet from the shore; between the rushes and the shore a heavy growth 

 of coarse, wide marsh grass, the whole not covering over from one to one and one-half 

 ;nrcs. The bank being a little higher than the ground back, the approach was unob- 

 served, and my appearance so unexpected and near gave the birds no time to cover their 

 eggs as is their wont, giving me a fine opportunity, on wading out, to see the eggs in 

 their nests. I collected the eggs from two nests, five in each, and counted from where 1 

 stood over twenty nests with from one to five eggs, quite a number completed, but with- 

 out eggs, and others building; nests floating, made of old or broken rushes, weeds, and 

 debris from the bottom and partially filled in and around the standing, growing rushes 

 — no feathers or lining of any kind; from five to ten inches in diameter; the outer edge 

 3 



