1890. ] NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 39 
November 17th, 1890. 
STATED MEETING. 
The President, Dr. NEwBErry, in the chair. 
About ten persons present. 
The minutes of November 10th were read and approved. 
Dr. BoLTon nominated as Resident Member 
SypNEY A. SmitH, A.B. 
Dr. FREDERICK STARR read the paper announced for the 
evening, entitled 
SOME WINNEBAGO ARTS, 
(Abstract. ) 
It is well known that a tribe may have peculiarities in speech, 
in manners, in arts, that distinguish it at once from its neigh- 
bors. The Haida carves slate as no other tribe does. The 
elegant blankets of mountain sheep wool from Chilcat are char- 
acteristic. The Hebrews tested the enemy with the word shid- 
boleth, and found that he could only say szbdoleth. A twist of 
the tongue in pronouncing a word is a small matter, but, small 
as it is, ib may be perpetuated for ages. 
Such a perpetuation of a tribal peculiarity has been aptly 
called an ethnic survival. Some of the advanced linguists of 
the present day are beginning to query whether the group 
of modern languages of the Aryan family are not examples 
of such ethnic survival; whether the differences between 
French and Italian and Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Slavonic, 
are not due to the difficulty various ancient tribes found 
in learning to speak the same new and foreign language. 
To draw an example of ethnic survival from another field 
of science, consider the art of the French cave-men. The 
archeologist finds in the caverns bones of various mammals, 
teeth of cave-bear, and antlers of reindeer carved with animal 
figures. ‘lhe art is good fora barbarous people, but it is cer- 
tainly barbarian art. The range of designs is quite great: horses, 
bears, mammoths, reindeer are among the figures. The people 
who did this work were an artistic people. ‘To carve and repre- 
sent animal forms was almost a mania with them. An ethnic 
impulse seems to have driven them on to such work, just as a 
similar impulse drives the Haida slate carver to-day; just as a 
