LXX BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY 
retained primitive characteristics. Thus, although the early 
records are diverse in value, the body of the literature of this 
class contains a large store of information concerning the 
physical characteristics, mental attributes, habits, customs, arts, 
beliefs, and institutions of the native Americans. Moreover, 
research concerning primitive peoples has shown that the ideas 
of the savage and barbarous peoples are expressed in the 
nomenclature much more fully and significantly than are those 
of cultured people, so that the records of personal and geo- 
graphic names are often of great utility as indices to the intel- 
lectual characteristics, customs, and institutions of the Indian 
tribes. Information of this class abounds in America. Thus 
there is a large store of information in the publications of the 
early and later travelers in America, but the literature is so 
vast and widely scattered that the information is nearly inac- 
cessible to students. 
Even before the institution of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology, ethnologists generally recognized the need of sys- 
-tematic information concerning the aboriginal tribes, and sev- 
eral students had made essays toward the collection of such 
information from the voluminous literature, either for personal 
use or for publication. When the Bureau was organized, one 
of the lines of work projected was the compilation of such 
information from the published literature and from manuscripts, 
the compilation being guided and corrected and the material 
enriched by concurrent research among the Indians them- 
selves. The bibliographic work undertaken in the Bureau, 
and so long successfully carried forward by Mr Pilling, was 
designed largely as a means to this end. In addition, all of 
the collaborators of the Bureau were instructed, and many 
correspondents were urged, to obtain and record general facts 
pertaining to the tribes with which they came in contact; and 
most of the collaborators of the Bureau have been employed 
from time to time in collating the material gathered in this 
way. Anterior to the institution of the Bureau, most of the 
students engaged in systemizing the ethnologic data, arranged 
the material alphabetieally on cards or in books, generally 
under tribal and other proper names—this was the method 
pursued by Dr O. 'T. Mason, of the Smithsonian Institution, 

