288 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



Dr. W. K. Gregory, assistant curator in the department of vertebrate palaeon- 

 tology, attended the Birmingham meeting of the British Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science, having been invited to take part in the discussion on convergence in 

 evolution. He also exhibited to the meeting some of the valuable specimens of early 

 Tertiary lemuroids secured by our recent expeditions in the Eocene of Wyoming, 

 with a discussion of their relationships to the various groups of Primates, living and 

 extinct, and presented a paper by Dr. W. D, Matthew summarizing the important 

 scientific results attained by the American Museum's expeditions in the Eocene forma- 

 tions during the last ten years, as conducted by Mr. Walter Granger. 



Rev. Gilbert L. Wilson of Minneapolis, a volunteer field-worker in anthropol- 

 ogy, has just completed two months' study of the "zooculture" of the Hidatsa-Man- 

 dan Indians in North Dakota. The term "zooculture" is often used to designate 

 all the relations between man and animals, especially such as are to any degree 

 domesticated. Mr. Wilson reports the work unusually successful. His notes show 

 that these people had worked out a detailed and definite body of knowledge for the 

 breeding, training and use of dogs as traction animals. Later when horses were 

 introduced among them, they worked out another system for that animal. The 

 results of this study will be published by the American Museum. 



Mr. Alanson Skinner returned from a four months' collecting trip among the 

 Indians of Manitoba and Wisconsin. While in Manitoba he made a detailed study 

 of the so-called Plains-Ojibway, a group regarding themselves as independent of the 

 Ojib way proper, and designating themselves as '"Bungi," a name not heretofore appear- 

 ing in ethnographical literature. Part of the Bungi reside on Turtle Mountain Re- 

 serve in North Dakota. The chief point of interest resulting from Mr. Skinner's 

 observations is that these Ojib way present very clearly traits of culture pertaining 

 both to the Central Algonkin tribes of the Eastern Woodlands and to the Plains 

 Indians of the buffalo country to the west. The study of these transitional or mixed 

 cultures is of great importance just now, because of the discussions between geog- 

 raphers and anthropologists as to the relation between geographical environment and 

 culture. Also, such studies bear directly upon the theoretical problem as to whether 

 a people gets its culture chiefly by borrowing it from others or by inventing it inde- 

 pendently under the stimulus of similar conditions of life. 



Messrs. Roy W. Miner and H. Mueller have recently returned from a collect- 

 ing trip to Passamaquoddy Bay on the boundary line between Maine and New Bruns- 

 wick. While in this region they obtained an extensive series of invertebrates for 

 purposes of comparison with similar forms collected in recent years from more south- 

 ern localities. Passamaquoddy Bay is an arm of the Bay of Fundy and is at the 

 threshold of that region of great tides which at this point reach a height of twenty- 

 eight feet above low water. Interesting observations were made in connection with 

 the distinctness with which the faunal zones of life separate from each other in the 

 " between-tides " area, as compared with the more condensed and overlapping condi- 

 tion of these zones in more southern waters, such as Casco Bay and the Woods Hole 

 region where the rise of the tides is not more than ten and five feet respectively. 



The Charles S. Mason archaeological collection from the vicinity of Jonesboro, 

 Tennessee, has been presented to the American Museum by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. 

 It contains several remarkable engraved shell gorgets and a number of unusual stone 

 implements among which are two large exceptional celts. The entire collection came 

 from one locality and thus constitutes an important addition to the Museum's series 

 for the Eastern States. 



