68 ANNUAL, REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1923 



Fox Society, known as ' They who go about singing ' (singing- 

 around rite)." This material will be published in the Fortieth 

 Annual Report of the bureau. A good beginning was also made on 

 the ceremonial " runners " and attendants. Tribal dissensions at 

 Tama cut short Doctor Michelson's stay among the Fox Indians and 

 he made a reconnaissance among the Potawatomi of Wisconsin, the 

 Chippewa at Reserve in the same State, the Ottawa of Michigan, the 

 Delaware-Munsee of Lower Canada, and the Montagnais of Lake 

 St. John, returning to Washington near the 1st of October. He 

 definitely determined that there are several different Delaware dia- 

 lects spoken in Canada and the United States, and that some of these 

 dialects are not clearly related ; so that the word Delaware is merely 

 a " catch all " term. 



After returning to Washington Doctor Michelson devoted his time 

 to elaborating the paper above mentioned on " The traditional origin 

 of the Fox Society, known as ' The Singing-around rite '," complet- 

 ing it for publication. 



About the middle of May Doctor Michelson left for the field to 

 make a reconnaissance of the Algonquin tribes of eastern United 

 States and Canada, including the Labrador Peninsula. His obser- 

 vations lead him to conclude that the aboriginal culture of the 

 Penobscots at Old Town, Me., is disintegrating. None of the young 

 people speak the language, and with the constant intermarrying 

 with whites it will be but a short time when ethnology and folklore, 

 which are both well remembered, will be a thing of the past. The 

 Malecites living at the " village," about 12 miles from Fredericton, 

 New Brunswick, cling tenaciously to the language, which is spoken 

 universally, though practically everyone also has a good command 

 of English. Their ethnology, on the other hand, is fast disappear- 

 ing. During his short visit with the Penobscots and Malecites, 

 Doctor Michelson determined a number of peculiar morphological 

 traits of the language as compared with central Algonquian. He 

 finds the phonetics of both languages extremely difficult, and on the 

 whole it may be said that neither language is archaic in type. On 

 June 13 Doctor Michelson arrived in Sydney Cape Breton, Nova 

 Scotia, en route to Labrador. 



The beginning of the fiscal year found Mr. John P. Harrington, 

 ethnologist, engaged in the preparation for publication of his recent 

 field notes on the Picuris and Taos tribes of New Mexico and the 

 Mission Indians of California. All the notes on the Taos Indians 

 collected by the late Mrs. M. C. Stevenson were copied and arranged 

 for publication. 



Mr. Harrington also prepared for publication a paper entitled 

 " Picuris Children's Stories with Texts and Songs." This manu- 



