1214 REPORT—1885. 
we shall look upon a neglect to conserve any valuable form of family type as a 
wrongful waste of opportunity. The appearance of each new natural peculiarity 
is a faltering step in the upward journey of evolution, over which, in outward 
appearance, the whole living world is blindly blundering and stumbling, but whose 
general direction man has the intelligence dimly to discern, and whose progress he 
has power to facilitate. 
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11. 
The foliowing Papers were read :— 
1. Insular Greek Customs. By J. Turoporr Bent. 
Reasons why the islands of the Aigean Sea have retained more ancient customs 
than the mainland: (a) from not being overrun by barbarian hordes, (0) not 
blended with Italian rulers, (¢) leniently treated by Turks. 
The customs concerning birth and childhood compared with ancient ones ; fate- 
telling ; deleterious influence of Nereids on children; the Nereids compared with 
ancient myths. The customs concerning death; the poetry of death-wails; the belief 
in Charon and Hades existing still; the freight-money for the ferryman of the Styx. 
Instances of burial in the islands. The feasts for the dead ; belief in vampires; and 
other points which can be traced to a remote antiquity. 
Love of a modern Greek for personifying the mysterious ; a modern Erinnys; 
the views of an islander on the sun; the month of March. 
Parallel cases from industrial life between ancient and modern times; the feast 
of Bacchus at Seriphos; Dionysos on Naxos; the drunken St. George on Paros; 
resinated wine. 
Some instances from agricultural life of a like nature. Ceremony before the 
sowing of seed ; skins for grain; granaries in the ground ; ploughs, hoes, and other 
articles of agriculture ; also names for animals. 
2. On the Working of the Ancient Monuments Act of 1882. 
By General Pirt-Rivers, Ff. B.S. 
3. American Shell-work and its Affinities. By Miss A. W. Bucktanp. 
In this paper the attention of anthropologists is called to some remarkable 
works in shell, recently discovered in mounds in various States of North America, 
as described by Mr. W. H. Holmes in a valuable contribution to the ‘ Proceedings 
of the Bureau of Ethnology,’ Washington. These shell-works consist not only of 
beads of various forms and sizes, but also of celts, fish-hooks, clubs and other im- 
plements of war and the chase; bracelets, pins, crosses of various forms, and more 
particularly of masks and elaborately engraved gorgets, the ornamentation upon 
which seems to bear some religious or astronomical signification. Some of these 
forms are traced by Mr. Holmes to ancient Mexico, and Miss Buckland points out 
that not only are almost all the forms, both of implements and ornaments, to 
be found in islands of the Pacific, but also that some of the peculiar symbols 
engraved upon the ancient American gorgets re-appear slightly altered on shell 
gorgets in the Solomon and Admiralty Islands, and also on the great drum from 
Japan exhibited this year at South Kensington. From this, and from the record 
of a Peruvian vessel laden with merchandise haying been met far out at sea by the 
Spanish navigators, it may be inferred that a commerce existed between the 
islands of the Pacific and the American continent prior to the Spanish Conquest, 
and that to this may be traced not only the resemblances in the shell ornaments 
