August 30, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



265 



I close with the hope that the students of 

 political economy associated with this Sec- 

 tion will see that this branch of their sci- 

 ence, the economy of natural resources, so 

 important and yet so much neglected, re- 

 quires on their part a fuller and more care- 

 ful consideration. B. E. Feenow. 



Department of Ageicultuee, 



Washington, D. C. 



CUBBENT NOTES ON ANTRBOPOLOGY {XII.). 

 ' CAEIB ART ' AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE. 



When Von Den Steinen went among the 

 Carib tribes of southern Brazil he was sur- 

 prised to find himself called by them a 

 ' Carib,^ until he found the word means ' a 

 stranger' (literally 'not like us'). It is, 

 and long has been, a term used extremely 

 vaguely. There are tribes in Central Amer- 

 ica called Caribs, who are no more allied to 

 the Caribbean stock than are the Iroquois. 

 In fact, there was not a single tribe of the 

 stock in North America anywhere at the 

 time of the discovery. 



' Carib art ' has been alleged to have left 

 its traces in Florida and in the Greater 

 Antilles ; but the curvilinear decorations, 

 the little clay images, and the broad, rough- 

 flaked arrow heads, asserted to be evidence 

 of Carib work, have yet to be shown to be 

 peculiar to that stock. In a recent pam- 

 phlet written by Mr. J. J. Quelch, curator 

 in charge of the British Guiana Museum at 

 Demerara, he mentions a number of such 

 objects found on the Puruni Kiver and the 

 east coast, which he inclines to attribute 

 to the Caribs, though historically they did 

 not live in that region. Other relics were 

 a small plate of gold, neat quartz beads, 

 perforated, granite plates, pots and polish- 

 ers and pottery with highly wrought fig- 

 ures of men and animals. These certainly 

 suggest a nation to the west of the lo- 

 cality, but not necessarily Carib. That 

 name should now be confined to the mem- 

 bers of the well-marked linguistic stock 



which we now know so well through the 

 admirable studies of Von Den Steinen and 

 Lucien Adam. It is in no wise synonymous 

 with ' Antillean,' as some have employed it. 



SYPHILIS AND LEPROSY IN ANCIENT AMERICA. 



As a question in the history of disease, as 

 well as having some archjeological bear- 

 ings, the presence of syphilis and leprosy 

 in America before the discoveiy has de- 

 servedly attracted the attention of investi- 

 gators. 



The latest contribution to the subject is 

 by Dr. Albert S. Ashmead, in a series of 

 articles in the Journal of the American Medi- 

 cal Association, reprinted in pamphlet form. 

 He has had the good idea of studying the 

 ancient pottery for representations of per- 

 sons afflicted with these deforming diseases, 

 and his results are quite remax'kable. He 

 finds in the mound pottery of the United 

 States, and especially in the ceramics of 

 Peru, numerous figures of persons with 

 their faces or members marred by some 

 erosive disease, akin to, if not identical 

 with, those mentioned. His conclusions are 

 that both prevailed in different parts of 

 America in pre-Columbian times; but that 

 the deformations represented are more 

 likely to be lupoid or syphilitic than lep- 

 rous, without, however, excluding the pos- 

 sibility of the latter. 



He does not consider that the presence 

 of these diseases on the American continent 

 would necessarily point to an extra- Ameri- 

 can source. We know too little of their 

 etiology to justify the construction of theo- 

 ries in that direction ; but it enables us 

 better to understand the significance of 

 many of the specimens in our museums. 



PREHISTORIC BOTANY. 



The American ethnologist, Charles Pick- 

 ering, devoted the last fifteen years of his 

 life to a vast work intended to show the 

 early history and migrations of the human 

 species by the distribution and cultivation 



