16 BUREAU OF AMEKICAN ETHNOLOGY 



toward a woman whom he selected to weave ceremonially 

 the rush-mat shrine for a waxobe when he was taking the 

 Qathadse degree. This man presented to Mr. La Flesche a 

 mnemonic stick owned by his father and gave the titles of 

 the groups of lines marked on the stick, each of which repre- 

 sents a group of songs. This mnemonic stick will be placed 

 in the National Museum with the Osage collection. 



Mr. John P. Harrington, ethnologist, spent the entire fiscal 

 year in making an exhaustive study of the Indians of the 

 Chumashan linguistic stock of southern California. Three 

 different bases have been established for working with in- 

 formants and elaborating the notes. The period from July 

 to October, inclusive, was spent at San Diego, Calif., where 

 every facility for the work was granted by the courtesy of 

 the Panama-California Exposition; November to March, in- 

 clusive, at the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles; and April 

 to June, inclusive, at Santa Ynez. The month of January, 

 1916, was spent at Berkeley, Calif., where, through the cour- 

 tesy of the Bancroft Library of the University of California, 

 various linguistic manuscripts and historical archives per- 

 taining to the Chumashan stock were studied and copied. 

 During the period named more than 300,000 words of manu- 

 script material were obtained and elaborated. In addition 

 to the grammatical and ethnological material an exhaustive 

 dictionary of the Ventureno is well under way, which com- 

 prises some 8,000 cards. This is to be followed by similar 

 dictionaries for the other dialects. The most satisfactory 

 feature of the work was the collection of material on the 

 supposedly extinct dialects of San Lius Obispo and La Puri- 

 sima. The Purisimeho material consists mainly of words 

 and corrected vocabularies, while on the Obispeno important 

 grammatical material was also obtained. A large part of 

 the material which still remains to be obtained depends on 

 the life of two very old informants, consequently it is most 

 important that Mr. Harrington continue his work in this 

 immediate field until the opportunities are exhausted. 



The beginning of the fiscal year found Dr. Truman Michel- 

 son, ethnologist, at Tama, Iowa, engaged in continuing his 

 researches among the Fox Indians, which consisted mainly 



