January 24, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



129 



Various authors (Virchow, DanielK, Joest) 

 liave spoken of these colored decorative 

 marks as true tattooing. Boggiani, how- 

 ever, by a closer examination of them, 

 reaches the opinion that they are paintings. 

 The materials used are various, as ferrous 

 oxide, cinnabar and the juice of the Bixa 

 orellana ; but that which produces the pe- 

 culiar tattoo-like appearance is the juice of 

 the Genipa oblongifolia, a sort of indigo fluid, 

 blue at first and turning black on exposure. 

 It has a slight corrosive action on the skin, 

 attacking the tissues of the epidermis, and 

 thus gives to the marks which it leaves sin- 

 gular permanency, and the appearance of 

 tattoo cicatrices. 



The article of Boggiani is well illustrated, 

 and is conclusive in establishing the pre- 

 valence throughout large areas in South 

 America of the use of this plant. 



^SOP IN AZTEC. 



Native Mexican, that is, ISTahuatl or Aztec 

 literature, is increasing to a respectable ex- 

 tent. Scarcely a year passes that some pro- 

 duct of the printing press appears in this 

 ancient and rich language. One of the 

 latest is the Fables of JEsop, published by 

 Dr. Antonio Peiiafiel, from a sixteenth cen- 

 tury translation. It is a pamphlet of 37 

 pages on good paper and in clear tj'pe. 



No certainty has been reached as to the 

 translator. It may have been Father 

 Sahagun, but I am inclined to Father Bau- 

 tista or some of his associates in the college 

 at Tlatelolco, where the native youth were 

 instructed in humanities and religion. It 

 was probably intended as a reading book 

 for them, and the forty-seven fables it con- 

 tains, rendered into the Nahuatl of that 

 early day, may still be followed as models 

 ■of grammatical purity. 



THE BEADING OF QUIPXTS. 



It is well known that the ancient Peru- 

 vians had a method of preserving their 

 records by means of strings, varied in hue. 



of different lengths and texture, and knotted 

 in sundry designs. The early historians 

 offer no clear explanation of them, and differ 

 widely in estimates of their value as records 

 of facts and ideas. They were called qidpus 

 ' — cords. 



It appears that they are still in use, and 

 Dr. Uhle, in the Ethnologisches Notizblatt, 

 of the Museum of Ethnography, Berlin 

 (Heft 2, 1895), explains several which he 

 found among the shepherds about Lake 

 Titicaca. They relate to the animals under 

 their care. The color indicates the sex, or 

 some other special series. The system is 

 decimal, the position indicating the tens 

 and hundreds. Those examined proved to 

 be merely mnemonic aids, based chiefly on 

 arithmetic ideas, and apart from these un- 

 intelligible by themselves. Doubtless the 

 ancient quipu readers extended their use to 

 all the needs of life in this direction, but 

 their principles of interpretation must have 

 been the same. D. G. Brinton. 



Univkesity of Pennsylvania. 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. 

 astkonomical. 

 Theee are numerous cases in astronomical 

 literature where astronomers have rejected cer- 

 tain observations because they did not agree 

 with their own. But it is really not often that 

 we find an astronomer gravely rejecting an ob- 

 servation simply because it did agree with his 

 own. In one of his recent double star orbit dis- 

 cussions, Dr. See, of Chicago, omitted to use 

 certain observations of Prof. Knorre. Dr. Bren- 

 del objected to this omission on the part of Dr. 

 See, in a recent number of the Astronomical 

 Journal. Now Dr. See replies, in the same 

 journal, that he omitted Prof. Kuorre's results 

 because they were nearly identical with his 

 own ! But Dr. See's reputation as an astrono- 

 mer is so good that we fear he will really have 

 to find a better reason for rejecting observa- 

 tions than the mere fact of their agreement 

 with his own. The whole thing looks like a 

 comedy of errors to which the present note will 

 perhaps add a final amusing scene. H. J. 



