TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 899 



2. Notice of Exploration of a Group of Mounds in Ohio. 

 By F. W. Putnam. 



The author gave notice of exploration of a group of mounds in Ohio, containing 

 not only burial mounds but others erected for quite a different purpose. He then 

 described the composition of one elaborate mound and of a group of mounds. 

 The area of the mound is covered with a composition of iron and gravel. The 

 stratification of the interior is not curved, but horizontal, though the exterior of 

 the mound itself is curved. The finds in these mounds were very curious, such as 

 ■ornaments in mica schists, and in native silver and gold, copper and iron. Images 

 •even are found in terra-cotta. 



3. On the Classification of North American Languages. 

 By Major J. W. Powell. 



Four great stocks covered the area of the United States, viz. : — the Algonquian, 

 with about 40 different languages ; the Siouan, with about 13 ; the Shoshonian, 

 with 18 ; and the Athabascan, very important in the Dominion. Altogether there 

 were 55 stocks represented in the United States. In conclusion, the author added 

 a few words on the affinities of languages : he did not believe in comparing 

 grammatic structure, but rather vocabularies. Institutions as a test of classifica- 

 tion were less permanent than languages, but more so than arts. Mythologies 

 probably were only inferior to languages. 



The President delivered the following Address: — 



Our newly-constituted Section of Anthropology, now promoted from the lower 

 rank of a Department of Biology, holds its first meeting under remarkable circum- 

 stances. Here in America one of the great problems of race and civilisation comes 

 into closer view than in Europe. In England anthropologists infer from stone 

 arrow-heads and hatchet-blades, laid up in burial-mounds or scattered over the sites 

 of vanished villages, that Stone Age tribes once dwelt in the land ; but what they 

 were like in feature and complexion, what languages they spoke, what social laws 

 and religion they lived under, are questions where specidation has but little guidance 

 from fact. It is very different when under our feet in Montreal are found relics 

 •of a people who formerly dwelt here, Stone Age people, as their implements show, 

 though not unskilled in barbaric arts, as is seen by the ornamentation of their 

 •earthen pots and tobacco-pipes, made familiar by the publications of Principal 

 Dawson. As we all know, the record of Jacques Cartier, published in the six- 

 teenth century collection of Eamusio, proves by text and drawing that here stood 

 the famous palisaded town of Hochelaga. Its inhabitants, as his vocabulary shows, 

 belonged to the group of tribes whose word for 5 is tcisk — that is to say, they 

 were of the Iroquois stock. Much as Canada has changed since then, we can still 

 study among the settled Iroquois the type of a race lately in the Stone A»e, still 

 trace remnants and records of their peculiar social institutions, and still hear spoken 

 their language of strange vocabulary and unfamiliar structure. Peculiar importance 

 is given to Canadian anthropology by the presence of such local American types of 

 man, representatives of a stage of" culture long passed away in Europe. Nor does this 

 by any means oust from the Canadian mind the interest of the ordinary problems of 

 European anthropology. The complex succession of races which make up the pedigree 

 of the modern Englishman and Frenchman, where the descendants perhaps of palseo- 

 lithic, and certainly of neolithic, man have blended with invading Keltic, Eoman, 

 Teutonic-Scandinavian peoples — all this is the inheritance of settlers in America as 

 much as of their kinsfolk who have stayed in Europe. In the present scientific visit 

 •of the Old to the New World, I propose to touch on some prominent questions 

 ■of anthropology with special reference to their American aspects. Inasmuch as in 

 an introductory address the practice of the Association tends to make arguments 

 unanswerable, it will be desirable for me to suggest rather than to dogmatise, 



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