NATG@RE 
993 
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1885 
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY 
Reizen en Onderzoekingen tn Noord-Amerika. Van Dr. 
H. F. C. Ten Kate, Jun. (Leyden: Brill, 1885.) 
Prehistoric America. By the Marquis de Nadaillac. 
Translated by N. D’Anvers. Edited by W. H. Dall. 
(London: Murray, 1885.) 
The Lenape Stone; or, the Indian and the Mammoth. 
By H.C. Mercer. (New York: Putnam, 1885.) 
R. TEN KATE (son of the celebrated Dutch 
painter) has published the account of his late 
anthropological journey in the regions about Arizona and 
New Mexico. His exploration was supported by the 
Government of Holland, for whose Rijks Museum at 
Leyden he brought home a collection illustrating the 
peculiar civilisation of the Pueblo Indians and their 
wilder neighbours of the plains ; also by several scientific 
bodies, among them the Anthropological Society of Paris, 
for which he took body-measurements of the various 
tribes he met with. Belonging to the school of ob- 
servers who depend on the measurement of skulls as a 
means of classing the natives of America into stocks 
of the general Mongoloid race to which they primarily 
belong (p. 432), he has to deal with the interesting 
problem, what relation the ruder and fiercer tribes bear to 
the comparatively cultured and peaceable dwellers in 
the pueblos. This, however, is confused by the fact 
that among neither is the type uniform. Dr. Ten 
Kate (p. 173) recognises among the Apaches two or 
three varieties, one more Mongolian and especially 
seen among the women, the others more of the bold- 
featured Redskin-type. The brachycephalic and occipit- 
ally flattened skull which he considers especially charac- 
teristic of the Pueblo Indians, enables him to contradict 
(p. 155) the opinion that the handsome Pimas belong to 
these. But then he finds it necessary to divide the 
Pueblos into much the same Mongolian and Redskin 
types (see his remarks on the Moquis, p. 253). On the 
whole his observations do not seem incompatible with 
the view that the difference between the roving Indians of 
the skin tents and the tillers of the fields around the towns 
of mud-brick houses depends less on race than on differ- 
ence of stage of civilisation, itself due in great measure to 
the respective circumstances of a wild life of war and 
plunder or a tame life of peace and industry. That the 
neighbourhood of the nations of Old Mexico may have 
influenced the civilisation of the Pueblo tribes is likely 
enough, but Dr. Ten Kate argues on grounds both of 
skull-measure and language (pp. 265, 221) against any 
identification of Zunis or Moquis with Aztecs. Indeed, it 
is the general experience of anthropologists, in spite of 
resemblances in such matters as the step-pattern on the 
pottery, that the language, customs, and religion which 
the natives of Zuni or Tehua have preserved since the 
Spanish Conquest, show original and peculiar types which 
are not to be accounted for as borrowed from Mexico. 
Thus the designs on the earthen water-vessels, when 
explained, prove not to be copies of Mexican ornaments, 
but mostly direct symbolic pictures, a spiral for the 
whirlwind, a semicircle with descending lines for a 
VOL. XXxXII.—No. 834 
rain-cloud, &c. This even affects the argument that the 
celebrated “‘cliff-dwellings” of the district were the 
strongholds of the ancestors of tribes such as the Moquis, 
who claim to continue and interpret the designs on their 
pottery (p. 265). Dr. Ten Kate had the good fortune of 
visiting Hualpé with Major Powell and seeing the Moqui 
snake dance (p. 242). He was allowed to go down the 
estufa to see the paraphernalia of the dancers and the 
vessel of drink taken as prophylactic against rattlesnake- 
bites, and his account of the dance itself, particularly as 
to the way in which the rattlesnakes are carried in the 
mouths of one set of dancers while another set by tickling 
them with feathers prevents their striking, is much in the 
same terms as that given by Capt. Bourke (see NATURE, 
vol. xxxi. p. 429). Mr. Cushing was still at the pueblo of 
Zuni under his Indian name of Ténatsali or “‘ Medicine 
Flower,” and with his guidance Dr. Ten Kate had oppor- 
tunities of studying the social life of the interesting matri- 
archal community. The main features of the family 
system are now clear, as to the young man being chosen 
by the young woman as “hers to be” (yz/uk’tantha) and 
his being taken by her father into the house as pupil 
(talahi) ; thus he passes into the position of a husband 
who can be sent back to his home, and the father of 
children who belong to their mother and inherit only 
from her. But in this and other accounts there are indi- 
cations of what is evident to every traveller who has 
visited a Zuni home—that the father after all has 
real power even in that matriarchal household. It is to 
be hoped that Mr. Cushing, when he gives the world his 
long-expected treatise on Zuni language, manners, and 
religion, will be able to make the practical working of 
the matriarchal life more perfectly intelligible to the pre- 
judiced patriarchal mind of the white man. Dr. Ten 
Kate inspected characteristic tribes throughout the New 
Mexican district, from these comparatively high Zufis 
down to the low Utes, noting details of customs and other 
anthropological material which at times illustrate the 
effects of intercourse through a yet wider range of culture. 
Thus the wooden plough and creaking ox-cart of ancient 
Rome, introduced into America by the Spanish con- 
querors, are to be seen at work in the fields around the 
pueblos ; and white men passing near an Indian cairn 
still throw each a stone upon it for luck (p. 271). 
The well-known questions as to America before the 
time of Columbus may be counted on more than ever to 
arouse the interest of even the “ general reader ””—whether 
and how the natives came across from Asia, whether they 
made or imported the peculiar civilisations of Mexico and 
Peru, and so on. Thus it was quite werth while to trans- 
late the Marquis de Nadaillac’s “ Amérique Préhistorique,” 
with its summaries of information and _ illustrations 
borrowed from the best sources. The work has been 
improved by being edited by Mr. W. H. Dall, whose own 
researches in the Aleutian region form one of the most 
interesting chapters in the anthropology of America. In 
the first place, the interesting though as yet hardly clear 
evidence is fairly given as to man’s existence in America 
before the recent geological period. One of its most 
curious details is the description by Ameghino the geo- 
logist (p.29) of his finding human remains on the banks 
of the Rio Frias, some twenty leagues from Buenos Ayres, 
associated with charcoal, potsherds, and stone arrow- 
(exe 
