June 23, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



901 



Oracles of the Saints: Phillips Baery. 



Divination, prohibited by decrees of early ec- 

 clesiastical councils, was not suppressed, but re- 

 mained an important by-product of popular re- 

 ligion. Some effort was made by a lax clergy to 

 establish a Christian technique in divination. 



Divination by opening the Scriptures at random 

 and taking as an oracle the first verse to meet the 

 eye, originated with St. Augustine, persisted in 

 spite of imperial and canon law, and is not yet 

 extinct. 



The "Oracles of the Saints"- — a manual of 

 divination for use of Christians, going back to the 

 sixth century, may be shown by documentary evi- 

 dence to have been compiled from catalogues of 

 oracular texts used in local pagan temples — an 

 evidence of the historic continuity between pagan 

 and Christian divination. 



Use of letters of the alphabet in divination, 

 widely current in the Middle Ages, is of pre-Chris- 

 tian origin, and may be traced to the usage of 

 Egypt-Greek magic and mystical cults. 



Ballads Surviving in the United States: C. Ai- 



PHONso Smith. 



Ballad singing is not a lost art, since 77 of the 

 origiaal 305 ballads are still sung in the United 

 States and about 85 in Great Britain. In the re- 

 covery of the ballad in the United States, the 

 South leads, Virginia reporting 36. Commimal 

 composition may be best illustrated by the eamp- 

 meeting songs of the southern negroes. ' ' The 

 Hangman's Tree" (No. 95) is popular among the 

 negroes of Virginia as an out-of-doors drama. A 

 comparison of ballad tunes shows greater variety 

 than of ballad texts. American ballad tunes and 

 American ballad texts may be older than their 

 surviving parallels in Great Britain. They may go 

 back to textual and melodic variants, which not 

 only antedate the surviving British variants but 

 which in some cases left no lineal British issue. 

 A comparison, for example, of seven musical ar- 

 rangements of "Barbara Allen," one from Scot- 

 land, one from England, and five recently trans- 

 cribed from the lips of singers in Virginia, no one 

 of whom understood music and four of whom were 

 from the same county, proves that the differences 

 are so great that neither the British nor the 

 Scotch melody can be claimed as the original. A 

 new field of comparative song is thus opened. 

 (This paper appeared in full in The Musical Quar- 

 terly, edited by O. G. Sonneck, New York and 

 London, January, 1916.) 



Fan-American Topic: Abraham Alvarez. 



After a brief consideration of the importance 

 of the study of the archeology of the American 

 continent, the author proposes as a means of con- 

 serving the pre-Columbian monuments the follow- 

 ing plan: 



Article I. The American governments agree to 

 establish a museum of American anthropology 

 and archeology, which shall be called ' ' Pan- 

 American Museum." 



Art. II. In this museum there shall be collected: 

 (o) American antiquities, (6) mummies, (c) 

 stuffed specimens of animals existing in the dif- 

 ferent countries from the time prior to the con- 

 quest to the present, {d) specimens of native 

 plants, (e) native minerals, (/) collections of 

 books relating to the ancient plans, photographs, 

 chromolithographs and detailed descriptions of all 

 the monimients and ruins of the pre-Columbian 

 epoch, (7t) maps of the respective countries show- 

 ing the location of each race or tribe and the posi- 

 tion of the ruins, (i) phonographs with records of 

 the speech and songs of the Indian languages for 

 the purpose of preserving said languages, {j) 

 studies of all the native races, (fc) studies of the 

 different native languages. 



Art. III. The ancient ruins shall be preserved 

 and cared for by each government. They shall not 

 be sold or given away or disposed of in any other 

 manner. They shall be the property of the nation. 

 Art. IV. Each museum shall send to the other 

 Pan-American museums reports of the anthropo- 

 logical and archeological work done during the 

 year within its jurisdiction. 



Art. V. All the objects to which Article II., 

 section (a), refers shall be property of the state 

 and should be placed in the museum, whatever may 

 have been the place they were found. 

 The Desirability of Uniform Laws throughout the 

 Pan-American Countries for the Encouragement 

 and Protection of the Study of Archeology and 

 Anthropology and the Collection of Material Be- 

 lating to these Sciences: Max Uhle. 

 The American nations have had only four cen- 

 turies of existence on this continent. They lack, 

 therefore, the long history which usually gives to 

 other peoples strength and power of resistance in 

 times of stress such as those through which all the 

 nations of America have had to pass. The lack of 

 a long national history must be made good by the 

 study of the peoples, who occupied the territory 

 before the time of Columbus. Prom this study 

 lessons may be drawn applicable to national de- 



