46 SCIENCE 
convince the members of this section and 
of our engineering societies of the impor- 
tance of establishing aeronautical labora- 
tories and courses of instruction in aerial 
engineering in America, in order to keep 
pace with their rapid development in 
Europe. The fundamental researches of 
our late associates, Langley, the physicist, 
and Chanute, the engineer, which first 
demonstrated the principles of dynamic 
flight, should be an incentive to further 
scientific work in this country towards its 
perfection. 
A. LAWRENCE RoTcu 
BuiuEe Hitt METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATORY, 
HypE PARK, Mass. 
THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE CULTURE 
OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN? 
IF one considers for a moment a map of 
the world, the two American continents are 
seen to possess one obvious characteristic 
in which the other great land masses do not 
share—isolation. From the time of the 
discovery America has been known as the 
new world, and indeed the name seems well 
deserved. Europe, Africa and Asia to- 
gether with Australia and most of the 
islands of the Pacific form a closely con- 
nected and nearly continuous area. With- 
in its limits races have come and gone, 
civilizations and cultures have risen and 
passed away, but each has been to some 
extent directly or indirectly influenced by 
others, and strong cultures have made their 
effects felt, albeit but faintly sometimes, to 
the furthest limits of this old world. <A 
Mongol chieftain once made all Hurope 
tremble; the conquests of a Chinese king 
perhaps decreed the age-long wanderings 
of the Polynesians; and the visions of an 
Arabian epileptic were the cause of move- 
ments that have overthrown empires and 
profoundly influenced the life of men from 
1 Address of the vice-president and chairman of 
Section H, Washington, 1911. 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 889 
the northern rim of Hurope to the edge of 
the South African deserts, and from the 
Pillars of Hercules to the Spice Islands of 
the east. 
To understand and analyze, therefore, the 
culture of any given people or portion of 
the old world, the possible far-reaching 
effects of other cultures even although re- 
mote, must be borne in mind. In this it 
would seem, however, that America might 
be excepted. As far back at least as his- 
tory or tradition goes it has stood alone, 
touching that other and older world only in 
the frozen north, and when, at the time of 
the discovery, Spanish, French and Hng- 
lish broke down its barriers of isolation, it 
was to reveal peoples and cultures which 
for centuries and perhaps millenniums had 
been developing their own civilizations ap- 
parently untouched, neither influencing 
nor being influenced by those of the old 
world. 
Yet in spite of the apparent isolation in 
which the people of America lived, no 
sooner were they known than various gen- 
eral similarities between them and peoples 
of the old world were observed, and theory 
after theory was brought forward attempt- 
ing to derive them or their culture en bloc 
from elsewhere. Some, mostly of the 
earlier period, looked to the Semites and 
the Lost Ten Tribes, others to China and a 
party of Buddhist monks; others still to the 
islands of the South Seas or to Egypt and 
the fabled Atlantis. All such theories, 
however, it need hardly be said, belong to 
the period before the present in which more 
accurate and abundant observation and 
careful scientific method are employed. 
In spite of the many such theories ex- 
ploited, the majority of students refused 
to accept the conclusions, many indeed go- 
ing to the opposite extreme. They admitted 
that the various cultures which, as a result 
of the activity of investigators, had been 
