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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIII. No. 1119 



signs used by the Indians witli those employed by 

 deaf mutes and indicates the origins of the Indian 

 sign language, citing cases related to this class of 

 language which were referred to by Homer in 

 the ' ' Odyssey. ' ' In speaking of the signs of the 

 Indians the author treats of pantomime as a means 

 employed in the communication between races of 

 distinct ethnic origin from times of the most re- 

 mote antiquity. He then refers to the particular 

 sign language of the North American Indians and 

 to the origin and propagation of the signs, as well 

 as to the grammatical rules to which the sign lan- 

 guage was subject. 



Om-aha and Osage Traditions of Separation: 



Fkancis La Fleschb. 



Before the advent of Europeans the Indians 

 had no means other than by oral accounts to trans- 

 mit their rituals and stories of important events. 

 Narratives, in their transmission, often lost im- 

 portant details of time or place. Accounts of 

 changes that occurred in a tribe became reduced 

 to a few words, as in the story of the separation 

 of the Omaha from the Osage. The Omaha story 

 of the separation came down in two versions: One 

 tells of the attempt to cross the Mississippi in 

 skin boats, of being separated by the rising of a 

 heavy mist; the other, of their efforts to cross the 

 liver by means of grapevines spliced together. 



On the visits of the Omaha to the Osage and the 

 Quapaw, members of these tribes say to their vis- 

 itors : ' ' You were a part of us, but you went away 

 in an angry mood and never came back, because 

 in the distribution of sinew you were slighted." 



An Osage who recently visited the Omaha gave 

 the detailed story, here recounted, of the separa- 

 tion as told by one who was a recognized authority 

 on the traditions of the Osage. In this story it 

 was shown that at a tribal ceremony two leaders 

 were reproved for violating the hunting usages. 

 Taking offense at this reproof, the two leaders 

 broke away from the tribe with many of the fam- 

 ilies of the various gentes, and these afterward 

 organized and became known as the Omaha tribe. 

 Zuiii Conception and Pregnancy Beliefs: Elsie 



Clews Paesons. 



Description of two phallic shrines. To give 

 birth to a girl, men sent out of house during labor. 

 Conception ceremonials. Conception of twins 

 through practises relating to deer. Deer bearing 

 twins. Pregnancy taboos : dyeing wool, firing pot- 

 tery, viewing a corpse, eating pino nuts, standing 

 at a window, scattering bran on oven floor. Albin- 

 ism due to parent eating white leaf inside the 



corn husk; blindness or lameness or malformation 

 to expectant father shooting animals in the eyes, 

 legs, etc. Birth-marks due to father dancing in a 

 ceremonial during the pregnancy; crying from 

 pain in the back, to maltreatment of horses; deaf- 

 ness, to mother stealing before the birth. Curing 

 by inoculation magic. 



Some Esoteric Aspects of the League of the Iro- 

 quois: J. N. B. Hewitt. 



In the esoteric thinking of the early prophetic 

 statesmen of the Iroquois and their co-tribesmen, 

 the League of the Five Tribes as an institution, 

 an organic unity, was conceived as a bi-sexed 

 being or rather person, i. e., an organic whole or 

 totality formed by the union of two human per- 

 sons of opposite sex. This conception appears in 

 the organic parts of the institution and in the 

 ritual governing the installation of its officers and 

 of those of its constituent organic parts. Owing 

 to the vastly differing viewpoint of the civilized 

 man of to-day from that of the founders of the 

 league, this esoteric meaning with its implications 

 is, perhaps, strange and he may apprehend it only 

 as metaphor, because to him it is only poetic. 



To those early prophetic statesmen, life was 

 omnipresent; obtrusively so. For, unconsciously, 

 it had been imputed by their ancestors to all bod- 

 ies and objects and processes of the complex world 

 of human experience. The life so imputed was 

 human-like life. And so as an organic totality, 

 the league of the Iroquois was conceived as an 

 animate person or being, endowed with definite 

 biotic properties or functions; among these char- 

 acters may be mentioned male and female sex, 

 fatherhood and motherhood, mind, eyesight, dream- 

 power, human blood; it was also conceived as hav- 

 ing a guardian spirit, even as its essential organic 

 parts had. These were distinct from those pos- 

 sessed, or supposed to be possessed, by the per- 

 sons who composed the people of the league. In 

 the ritual of installation of chiefs, each of the 

 constituent persons, the father and the mother 

 principles represented in the league, is addressed 

 as a single individual, in all of the many ad- 

 dresses and chants and songs. In the so-called Six 

 Songs, which are so dramatically sung by one rep- 

 senting the dead chief to be resurrected, each of 

 these constituent persons is addressed, but in the 

 fifth song the Totality, the League as a Unity, is 

 addressed as a person, for in its honor is this fifth 

 song being sung. 



Tribes of the Pacific Coast: A. L. Kroeber. 

 This paper analyzes a commonly accepted cul- 



