40 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 
realization of this plan, owing largely to lack of funds for the employment of 
assistants in preparing the materials. It is hoped, however, that such a series 
of vocabularies, based on the published grammars and on the series of texts 
above referred to, may be prepared for publication in the near future. Much 
of the preliminary work has been done. There are, for example, extended 
manuscript dictionaries of the Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Chinook, and Sioux, 
but none of them is yet ready for the printer. 
The work on Part 2 of the Handbook of American Indian Languages is pro- 
gressing satisfactorily. The sketch of the Takelma is in page form (pp. 1-296), 
but Dr. Boas has undertaken the correlation of this sketch with the Takelma 
Texts which meanwhile have been published by the University of Pennsylvania, 
and a considerable amount of work remains to be done to finish this revision. 
The Coos grammar is in galleys. The Coos Texts are at the present writing 
being printed by the American Hthnological Society, and here also references 
are being inserted. Dr. Leo J. Frachtenberg has continued his collection of 
material for the handbook with commendable energy and intelligence. The 
field work has been financially aided by Columbia University, partly through 
a gift made by Mrs. Henry Villard and partly through funds provided by Mr. 
Homer EH. Sargent. It has also been possible to utilize for the work on the 
Alsea the collections made at a former time by Prof. Livingston Farrand on an 
expedition supported by the late Mr. Henry Villard. On his last expedition 
Dr. Frachtenberg was able to determine that the Siuslaw is an independent 
stock, although morphologically affiliated with the Alsea, Coos, and Siuslaw 
group. He also collected extensive material on the Alsea and Molala. 
The most important result, which is appearing more and more Clearly from 
the investigations carried out under the direction of Dr. Boas, lies in the fact 
that it will be possible to classify American languages on a basis wider than 
that of linguistic stocks. In 1893 Dr. Boas called attention to the fact that 
a number of languages in northern British Columbia seem to have certain 
morphological traits in common, by which they are sharply differentiated from 
all the neighboring languages, although the evidence for a common origin of 
the stocks is unsatisfactory. Dr. Boas and his assistants have followed this 
observation, and it can now be shown that throughout the continent languages 
may be classed in wider morphological groups. It is interesting to note that 
phonetic groups may be distinguished in a similar manner, but these do not 
coincide with the morphological groups. These observations are in accord 
with the results of modern inquiries in Africa and Asia, where the influence of 
Hamitie phonetics on languages of the Sudan and the influence of Sumerian 
on early Babylonian have been traced in a similar manner. Analogous con- 
ditions seem to prevail also in South Africa, where the phonetics of the Bush- 
man languages have influenced the neighboring Bantu languages. In this way 
a number of entirely new and fundamental problems in linguistic ethnography 
have been formulated, the solution of which is of the greatest importance for 
a clear understanding of the early history of the American Continent. 
The Handbook of American Indian Languages as planned at the present 
time deals exclusively with an analytical study of the morphology of each 
linguistic family, without any attempt at a detailed discussion of phonetic 
processes, their influence upon the development of the language, and the rela- 
tion of dialects. Dr. Boas recommends that the present Handbook of American 
Indian Languages be followed by a series of handbooks each devoted to a 
single linguistic stock, in which the development of each language, so far as it 
can be traced by comparative studies, should be treated. 
The study of aboriginal American music was conducted among the Chippewa 
Indians by Miss Frances Densmore, who extended her field of work previously 
