246 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XII. No. 305. 



ETHNOLOGY. 

 A Mexican Feather Ornament. 



The trustees of the Peabody Museum of Cambridge have decided 

 to issue in a separate form such special papers as have heretofore 

 been published in connection with the annual reports. The first 

 number of this new publication, which will have the title Archce- 

 ological and Ethnological Papers of the Peabody Museu?n, has 

 just been issued, and is of great interest. Mrs. Zelia Nuttall dis- 

 cusses the meaning of the widely known Mexican feather ornament 

 in the Vienna Museum of Natural History, which dates back to the 

 time of Charles V. The modest title ' Standard, or Head-Dress,' 

 which she has given to her study, covers, however, an historical 

 investigation of the greatest value. Starting from a consideration 

 of the interesting specimen, she gives conclusive proof that it was 

 one of the head-dresses used by Mexican war-chiefs. In this in- 

 vestigation the authoress for the first time applies her discovery of 

 complementary signs in the Mexican graphic system, which was 

 announced two years ago at the Buffalo meeting of the American 

 Association, to deciphering a certain iconograph ; and in an appen- 

 dix she sets forth more fully the essential^ features of these signs. 

 A hieroglyph may represent various sound-combinations, as the 

 object represented is liable to be designated by synonymous names. 

 In order to show which name was meant, complementary signs 

 were used, the phonetic value of which determined which word was 

 meant. An arm and hand, for instance, might express maitl 

 (' arm ') as well as acolli (' shoulder '). If above the arm the con- 

 ventional sign for water (att) is painted, yielding in composition 

 the phonetic value a, which is also the first syllable of the word 

 acolli, this complementary sign indicates that the latter word is 

 meant. This discovery of Mrs. Nuttall promises to be a great help 

 in the decipherment of Mexican texts. The question as to the real 

 significance of the feather ornament is decided by a thorough in- 

 vestigation of the use of banners and head-dresses in ancient 

 Mexico. The authoress's final conclusions are briefly summed up 

 as follows : The testimony of native Mexican paintings and sculp- 

 ture, and of early Spanish records, taken into consideration with 

 the evidence furnished by its structure, and also by the appellation 

 bestowed upon it in the Inventory of 1596, in which the first record 

 of the specimen is found, proves it to be a head-dress. Manufac- 

 tured with the utmost care, of materials most highly esteemed by 

 the Mexicans, uniting the attribute and emblematic color of Huitz- 

 ilopocholli, fashioned in a shape exclusively used by the hero-god's 

 living representative, the high-priest and war-chief, this head- 

 dress could have been appropriately owned and disposed of by 

 Montezuma alone at the time of the Conquest, from which period 

 it assuredly dates. 



Textile Patterns of Ancient Peru. — Dr. Alphons Stiibel, 

 who, in company with W. Reiss, spent five years in travels of 

 discovery through Peru and other parts of South America, and 

 edited conjointly with him the pictorial work, ' Das Todtenfeld 

 von Ancon ' (Berlin, 1880-87), i" a volume published at the cele- 

 bration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Dresden Geographical 

 Society, treats on " textile patterns of ancient Peru compared with 

 analogous ornaments of classic art." The various ornaments, con- 

 sisting of squares, trapezoids, lozenges, circles, etc., give origin to 

 more complicated ornaments by a combination of the same geo- 

 metrical figures whenever one of these is shoved on to another of 

 the same description by sliding it on below, on the sides, or on any 

 point where both can combine. Stiibel's ideas are very original 

 and ingenious, but whether the inventors of these ornaments really 

 obtained the ideas for their multiple patterns in this way is rather 

 to be doubted. The pamphlet is illustrated by a large number of 

 designs, and fully deserves notice. 



The Migrations of the Bantu. — Mr. H. H. Johnson, the 

 well-known African explorer, advances, in a recent number of the 

 Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, a suggestive theory 

 of the origin and migrations of the Bantu and their northern neigh- 

 bors. He believes that their common home was in the region be- 

 tween the Shari and Welle-Ubangi. From this centre, he thinks, 

 emigrants had constantly been starting to the west, and had carried 

 with them their languages, which have given rise to most of the 



languages in western Africa between the Gambia and the Niger. 

 But there still remained in this district north of the Kongo, east of 

 the west coast watershed, south of Lake Chad, and west of the west- 

 ern affluents of the Nile, two flourishing and nearly allied tribes, 

 whom he calls the Bantu and Semi-Bantu. Later on, both peoples- 

 were driven from their homes. The Semi-Bantu proceeded due 

 west towards the Niger, and the Bantu turned to the south and 

 south-east. The Semi-Bantu greatly discarded and wore away the 

 grammatical structure inherited from its mother, and which its 

 Bantu sister developed and perfected, but retained in a great meas- 

 ure its primal stock of word-roots. Mr. Johnson continues, " These 

 tongues, while retaining many roots in common with the Bantu, 

 have a grammatical structure which lacks all, or nearly all, Bantu 

 features. The resemblance in vocabulary to the Bantu increases- 

 as you proceed eastward, but is not to be explained by the theory of 

 ' loan-words,' because the similarity of the word-roots strikes too 

 deeply into the language-system." We would be more inclined to 

 conclude from this statement that the ' Semi-Bantu ' are mixed 

 languages. "The primitive Bantu tribe," Mr. Johnson continues,- 

 " moved away from its original home in a south and south-easterly 

 direction, and probably located itself for some time in the district 

 lying between the Welle, the Kongo, and the Muta-Nzige and Al- 

 bert Nyanza Lakes. Here, no doubt, it settled down for a while,, 

 and throve and multiplied ; and here probably it received the ox^ 

 sheep, goat, pig, and domestic fowl from tribes to the north, ta 

 whom they had permeated from Egypt. Rapid increase and its 

 consequent troubles caused the primal Bantu people to again split 

 up and its sections to part company, and the great Bantu invasion 

 and occupation of the southern half of Africa began to take place. 

 Except the feeble, dwarfish races of Akka or Hottentot and Bush- 

 men, there seem to have been few inhabitants to dispute southern 

 Africa with the Bantu, and from their centre of activity they sent 

 out streams of emigrants westward along the Welle and the Kongo,, 

 eastward to the Nile lakes and the Zanzibar coast, and southward 

 to Damaraland and Natal." Although this detailed theory seems- 

 to be constructed on rather slight evidence, it is an interesting at- 

 tempt at explaining the complicated ethnological phenomena of 

 Africa. 



ELECTRICAL SCIENCE. 



Electric Street-Railways. 



The next three months will determine whether there will be 

 rapid advance in the equipment of electric street-railways, or 

 whether they will have a decided set-back. There have been roads- 

 equipped in New England during the summer that will have a se- 

 vere test this winter, and there are few places where the equipment 

 will not have to do heavier work than ever before. 



At the beginning of the year the Sprague Electric Railroad and 

 Motor Company did not have a car running ; the Thomson-Hous- 

 ton Company — then the Van Depoele Company — had half a 

 dozen roads in operation ; the Daft Company, about as many. 

 To-day the Sprague Company has thirty roads completed or in 

 course of construction ; the Thomson-Houston Company, about as 

 many ; the Daft Company, perhaps a dozen ; with a number of 

 other systems represented by single roads in different localities. 



There have, too, been radical changes in the methods that were 

 used only a short time ago. The Thomson-Houston truck, with 

 the motor pivoted on the axle and gearing direct to it, is a very- 

 different affair from the Van Depoele motor placed in a compart- 

 ment in the car, driving the wheel-axle by a chain belt. The 

 Sprague Company have also gained something from experience ; 

 and the last type of motor and gear with the single magnetic cir- 

 cuit, the admirably simple method of reducing the speed, and with 

 the new brush for the commutator, is a marked improvement on 

 the type they have been building. 



It is significant, that, with a few exceptions, the method used to- 

 convey the current to the car is by an overhead wire. The ques- 

 tion of street-car propulsion is mainly one of economy, and it is 

 but natural that horses should be first displaced where the most 

 economical electrical system is allowable. But it will be seen, 

 that, if we are to retain our prejudices against the overhead wires 

 in our city streets, the real problem of displacing horses in city 



