Oct. 3. 1889] 



NA TURE 



557 



The Winnipeg Mound Region, by Dr. George Bryce, of the 

 Winnipeg College. 



New Linguistic Family in California, by H. Henshaw. 



Onodaga Shamanic Masks, by De Cost Smith (Onodaga is a 

 county in the State of New York). 



The Phonetic Alphabet of the Winnebago Indians, by Miss 

 Alice C. Fletcher, 



The Medawiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibway, 

 by W. J. Hoffman. 



Notes on Aboriginal Fire Making, by Walter Hough. 



Aboriginal Mounds of North Dakota, by Henry Montgomery. 



The Iroquois While Dog Feast, by Rev, W. M. Beauchamp. 



Algonkin Onomatology, by A. F, Chamberlain, of University 

 College, Toronto. 



Government of the Six Nations, by 0-ji-ja-tek-ha. 



Results of Explorations about the Serpent Mound of Adams 

 Co., Ohio, for which a grant was made by the Association, by 

 F. W. Putman. 



Aboriginal Monuments of North Dakota, by Henry Mont- 

 gomery. 



Steatite Ornaments from the Susquehanna River, by Atreus 

 Wanner. 



Notes on the Eskimo of Cape Prince of Wales, Hudson's 

 Strait, by F. F. Payne, of the Observatory, Toronto. 



The following is a brief abstract of Sir Daniel Wilson's 

 interestirg paper on the Huron-Iroquois — a branch of a subject 

 in which the writer has for many years conducted important 

 and successful researches : — 



The Hitron-Iroqiwis of Eastern Canada. — On the occasion 

 of the first meeting of the American Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science in the province of Ontario, it was perhaps 

 a matter of interest to the members of the Anthropological 

 Section to have some special notice of the aborigines of this 

 region to the north of the great lakes. Sir David Wilson 

 accordingly noted that the Indians found in this province on its 

 first occupation by English settlers, as well as those now settled 

 on their reserves in Ontario, are nearly all later intruders than 

 the Anglo-Canadian occupants of the soil. On the Grand River 

 the Six Nation Indians have now been settled for upwards of a 

 century, and have made great progress in civilization. They 

 include the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, 

 and Tuscaroras. But they followed the loyalist British colonists, 

 with whom they had taken part in the War of Independence ; 

 and the first of them still preserve the prized heirloom brought 

 with them when they forsook their old native valley of the 

 Mohawk — the silver communion service, inscribed "A.R, 1711, 

 The gift of Her Majesty, Ann, by the Grace of God, of Great 

 Britain, France, and Ireland, and of her plantations in North 

 America, Queen, to Her Indian Chappel of the Mohawks." 

 ]5ut though the Six Nation Indians have occupied their reserves 

 on the Grand River for little more than a century, they belong 

 to the great Huron-Iroquois stock, of which Canada is the 

 original home. The speaker accordingly gave a detailed account 

 of the first direct knowledge of the Hurons of the St. Lawrence 

 Valley derived from Jacques Cartier's narrative of his two voyages. 

 He first entered the St. Lawrence in 1535, when he found the 

 palisaded Indian towns of Stadacone and Hoschelaga, on the 

 sites of Quebec and Montreal. We owe to him a vocabulary of 

 their language which proves them to have been Wyandots or 

 Hurons. But when Champlain followed, in 1615, the whole 

 region was a desert. An account was then given of the Huron 

 settlements visited by Champlain on the Georgian Bay, and 

 their extermination by the Iroquois in 1648. Next the 

 traditions of the race were referred to, all in legendary 

 fashion, embodying the myth of their emerging from the heart 

 of a mountain between Quebec and the Great Sea. Their 

 country thus reached, apparently, to the Labrador frontier, 

 contiguous to the Eskimo country. Skulls of the Hurons and 

 Iroquois were produced, including a cast of that of the famous 

 Mohawk chief, Brant ; and attention was drawn to the strik- 

 ing contrast which their predominant dolichocephalic type 

 presented to that of the prevalent American type of skull. In 

 this respect the Huron-Iroquois head-form approximates to that 

 of the Eskimo, and the special aim of the paper was to show 

 the reasons for believing in an admixture at some remote date 

 of this American stock with the Eskimo, who have been in- 

 variably recognized by ethnologists as a distinct type from the 

 true Indian of the northern continent. 



The Rev. Mr. Beauchamp's contribution on the Iroquois 

 white dog feast had some points of interest. Among the 



Iroquois, the Senecas and Onondagas alone, the writer showed,, 

 seemed to have observed the annual white dog feast, and that 

 only within recent times. It combines some features of both 

 the dream and war feasts, of which it is the successor, and is the 

 beginning of the new year. Penitential exercises take up a 

 portion of the time, with games and various performances of 

 the false faces. His sins confessed and forgiven, his appointed 

 offering made and the fire rekindled on his hearth, the Indian 

 was prepared to enter hopefully on a new year, especially if 

 dreams and games had turned out well. The feast has now lost 

 some of its most striking features, and will very soon altogether 

 pass away. 



Section of Geology and Geography. 



The Section of Geology and Geography also devoted much of 

 its time to topics of American interest. Mr. Charles White, in 

 his address as Vice-President, touched on " The Mesozoic 

 Division of the Geological Record as it is exhibited on this 

 Continent," referring more particularly to the principal sub- 

 divisions of the Mesozoic that have been recognized in North 

 America, their inter-delimitation, their division as a whole from 

 the Carboniferous system beneath and the Caenozoic above. He 

 held that the Mesozoic strata of the Atlantic coast region con- 

 sist of a probable representation of the Upper Trias of Europe, 

 a possible one of the Upper Jura, a probable slight one of the 

 Middle Cretaceous, but with a hiatus between the latter and the 

 Eocene. 



Another paper in this Section, dealing in comparisons of 

 Cis- with Trans-Atlantic formations, was that of Prof. H. S. 

 Williams, of Cornell University, Ithaca. He gave an account 

 of his examination ot the English Devonian rocks, under the 

 leadership of Messrs, Ussher and Townshend Hall, during the 

 visit of the International Congress of Geologists in 1888. Com- 

 parison of the rocks and fossils with those of Eastern North 

 America led to the conclusions (a) that the fossils are very closely 

 allied to the species of the New York Devonian, although in the 

 great majority of cases passing under different names ; and (b) 

 that the rocks, in their appearanc:, composition, and order, are 

 as different as two distinct systems well can be. The great 

 Devon limestone of South Devonshire and Cornwall furnished 

 the fossils upon which Lonsdale based his conclusion that the 

 fauna was intermediate between the fossils of Murchison's 

 Silurian system and those of the Carboniferous limestone, which 

 led to the establishment of a "Devonian" system. When 

 other European localities had furnished more perfect sections of 

 this system, the fauna of this limestone was recognized as the 

 Middle Devonian fauna, and that of Marwood, Pilton, Sloly, 

 &c., as an Upper Devonian fauna. But neither the order of 

 sequence of the rocks nor the separation of the fossils into well- 

 defined faunas can be satisfactorily determined by study of these 

 Devonian rocks alone. Although they have furnished geological 

 nomenclature with a name for the system, they are far from being 

 typical of the Devonian system, as known to most geologists. 

 Comparison of the faunas of the European Devonian faunas 

 with those of the Appalachian basin leads to the hypothesis that 

 the marine life of the two areas had different histories. There 

 is a continuity in the succession from lowest to highest zones of 

 the system in Europe which we do not find in the American 

 series. It is evident that the American Lower and Middle 

 Devonian faunas are more distinct from the corresponding faunas 

 of Europe than are the "cuboides" and later Devonian faunas 

 of the two areas. To account for these facts it is conjectured 

 that a barrier separated the two districts during the lower and 

 middle stages of the Devonian, and that with the "cuboides" 

 stage an incursion of European species began from the European 

 area westward or north-westward, penetrating the Appalachian 

 basin. The mingling of species was not complete, and was 

 stopped altogether by the elevation which terminated the marine 

 Chemung fauna of the New York area. The author also found 

 evidence for the belief that the early Carboniferous faunas ad- 

 vanced northward in the central and Appalachian basins to take 

 the place of the Hamilton and Chemung faun-is, which in large 

 measure ceased. 



Mr. Frank Leverett, of the U.S. Geological Survey, read a 

 paper on the glacial phenomena of North-Eastern Illinois and 

 Northern Indiana. The paper opens with an explanation of 

 the methods of study already employed, and other methods to be 

 employed in deciphering the history of the drift, A brief 

 discussion is given of the features and phenomena included under 

 the term moraine as restricted in the paper. Among these 



