NOTE ON THE ACCOMPANYING PAPERS 



The present annual report is accompanied with two memoirs, 

 namely, Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indiains, by Matilda Coxe Stevenson, 

 and An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-lore of the Guiana Indians, 

 by Walter E. Roth. 



The contribution first mentioned may be regarded as supplementary 

 to Mrs. Stevenson's memoir on The Zuni Indians, jiublished as the 

 accompanying paper of the Twenty-third Annual Report of the 

 Bureau. In recent yeai-s much attention has been ilevoted to study 

 of the various uses to which plants have been put by the Indians. 

 This is the second paper devoted e.xclusivoly to the subject which 

 the Bureau of iVjnerican Ethnology has taken in hand for pubhcation. 



That plants play an important part in the daUy life of the Zuni, as 

 indeed of all Indian tribes, is shown by Mi-s. Stevenson, who finds 

 that in Zuni belief plants are verily a part of themselves. Plants, 

 indeed, are i-egarded as sentient beings, for the initiated of the Zuni 

 can talk with them, and the plants can talk with the initiated. 

 Plants also arc sacred, for some of them were dropped to earth by 

 the Star People; some originally were human beings, others are the 

 property of the gods, and all are the offspring of the Earth Mother. 

 Therefore so interwoven with ])lant life, in both a religious and an 

 economic way, are the customs and beliefs of the Zuni people, and 

 so dependent are they on the products of the soil, that their cidture 

 may be said to have had its origin in concepts pertaining to the 

 vegetal kingdom. 



Mrs. Stevenson, like Dr. Washington Matthews before her, finds 

 that plants used by the Indians in medicine are not employed entirely 

 in a shamanistic way, experience having shown that many medicines 

 derived from plants have medicinal value, and are properly and 

 effectually prescribed by the native doctors, although we may not 

 presume that the medical practices of the Zuni, notwithstanding the 

 relatively high degree of culture of that tribe, have passed beyond 

 the empirical stage. 



Mrs. Stevenson describes the various uses to which plants and 



their parts are put by the Zuni, in medicine, food, weaving, dyeing, 



and basketry, in the decoration of pottery, in the toilet, in folk-lore 



and ceremony, and in names pertaining to the clans. It is trusted 



that these results of Mrs. Stevenson's studies will suggest to others 



the need of giving special attention to this interesting and important 



phase of the ethnologv of our Indian tribes. 



25 



