70 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
The luxuriant vegetation of the Pacific islands renders pottery 
unnecessary, its place being supplied by joints of the bamboo, by gourds 
and the shells of cocoanuts ; but the ceramic art of the Turanian areas 
of northern Europe and Asia used to be, probably where exercised is still, 
of the same nature as that of this continent, such as has been exhumed 
from many mounds and as is still manufactured by the Pueblo Indians 
of New Mexico. According to tradition, the Algonquins were not 
originally potters and rarely practised the art, but some of them copied 
the practice from adjoining tribes. The use of wampum and of orna- 
mentation in beads, originally sections of hollow shells, looks like the 
device of a maritime people, and many Algonquin tribes are adepts at it, 
yet in the transactions of the Imperial Society of Geography at St. 
Petersburg, are found coloured illustrations of Siberian bead ornaments, 
in design and general character identical with those so familiar in 
Canada. Scalping was a custom of the Northern Scyths in the time of 
Herodotus, and was almost universal in North America, but decapitation, 
judging from the practice of the Beothiks, was the original Algonquin 
substitute for it, as it is among the Malay-Polynesians, whose head- 
hunting is notorious. This same head-hunting prevailed among the 
Huastec-Maya-Quiche tribes of Central America, and among the Caribs 
and similar tribes of the southern continent, Loan arts and customs 
have done much to obscure the relations of different tribes and make 
aboriginal archeology very much the same throughout the whole of 
America. Even the implements of the western coast tribes mediate 
between the stone of the Aleutian water-men and the wood and fish- 
bone of the Pacific islander of the South. 
Much has been written by the late Colonel Garrick Mallery on the 
Sign and Gesture Language and on the Pictographs of the American 
Indians, but little attempt has been made to classify these or to trace 
their origin. The same is the case with Dr, Yarrow’s Mortuary Customs. 
Lewis Morgan’s valuable treatises on Indian clans and relationships, and 
on aboriginal houses and house building exhibit the same tendency to 
set forth the native American as one species, and level up or down all 
differences in kinship and architecture. Longfellow’s Hiawatha, which, 
beautifully mixes up, in a measure borrowed from the Fins, the mytho- 
logy of the Iroquois, Dakotas, and Algonquins, is a type of aboriginal 
studies in general, largely made without that respect of persons which is 
absolutely necessary to exact science, Extensive explorations have been 
made of ancient seats of civilization, and much has been written on the 
architectural remains of Peru and Central America, of Mexico and the 
Southern Pacific States. The cyclopean walls of old Peruvian cities rival 
those of Tiryns and Mycenæ, yet without any Greek feature. The 
Stonehenge of Tiahuanaco, supposed to have been set up among the 
ancestors of the still living Aymaras, in a single night by an invisible 
hand, claims kindred with that of Wiltshire in England, and that of 
