Januabt 5, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



29 



de Grammatica ' of the ' Brazilian ' or Guarani 

 language. He was on the return trip to the 

 mother country, Portugal, when he became 

 shipwrecked at the mouth of the Amazonas, at 

 Maraj6 Island, attacked by the Aroan savages 

 and put to death on July 6, 1638. 



The main part of Platzmann's volume is 

 followed by a series of 1991 Guarani terms of 

 Figueira translated and commented upon in 

 German. In reading this list we often wish to 

 have the original of the Arte in hand for refer- 

 ence. 



In the preface Platzmann discusses the pho- 

 netics of that language and the characters used 

 by the Padre to express certain sounds. There 

 are also literary sketches on previous and re- 

 cent Portuguese authors on Brazil, its Indians 

 and their languages, and on the area in which 

 Tupi is spoken at present. 



Another apostle of the Roman Catholic faith 

 among the Brazilian tribes was Antonio Ruiz de 

 Montoya. He was born in Lima, 1583, and 

 died there in 1652 ; therefore he can be con- 

 sidered as an American-born missionary. His 

 earliest work appears to have been the Tesoro, 

 a Guarani- Spanish dictionary of 814 pages, 

 which saw the light in Madrid, 1639. This 

 was followed next year by the Arte or grammar 

 of Guarani, the Vocabulario and the Catecismo ; 

 this last was reprinted by Platzmann in 1876. 

 The words of the language are presented, ana- 

 Ij'zed and translated in 2236 items. This part 

 of the volume is instructive, but the part of 

 Platzmann's preface in which he compares 

 Guarani radicals with those of European lan- 

 guages contains too many fanciful ideas to meet 

 general approval. 



Having previously republished Bernard 

 Havestadt's ' Tractatus de lingua Chilensi,' in 

 two volumes, Dr. Platzmann was informed that 

 his publications of Havestadt's ' Opera ' were 

 not complete without his ' Lachrymse salu- 

 tares.' So he set himself to commit this Latin 

 religious poem, although it has nothing to do 

 with Indian philology, to press. It is written 

 in fine trochaic verses, which were in vogue in 

 his time for church poetry. 



Juan Pelleschi is a civil engineer, who wrote 

 his book in Italian and had it translated in 

 Spanish. He treats of the customs and man- 



ners of the Matacos or Mataguayos, a roving 

 people inhabiting the Gran Chaco, not in a 

 strictly scientific manner, but in a colloquial 

 way. This may be said also of his treatment of 

 the Mataco language, which is identified with 

 the Tonocot6. We find no paradigms of nouns 

 or verbs, no rules, exercises, etc., but the 

 character of this tongue is developed at length 

 and in a general way without any strict plan or 

 method. Of the two maps the first is a repro- 

 duction of an ancient map and exhibits in an 

 excellent manner the early distribution of tribes 

 on the Gran Chaco. A Spanish-Mataco and a 

 Mataco-Spanish vocabulary concludes the pub- 

 lication. 



Albert S. Gatschet. 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



At the 508th meeting of the Society, held on 

 December 9th, at the Cosmos Club, biographical 

 sketches of Mr. Edward Goodfellow and of 

 George Brown Goode, were read ; the former 

 by Mr. H. G. Ogden, and the latter by Mr. 

 Cyrus Allen. The regular papers of the even- 

 ing were by Mr. E. D. Preston on the ' Lan- 

 guage of Hawaii,' by Mr. F. H. Bigelow on 

 ' Results of Recent Exploration of the Upper 

 Atmosphere,' and by Mr. G. W. Littlehales on 

 'Possible Methods of Measuring the Resultant of 

 the Centrifugal and Gravitational Forces on the 

 Ocean.' The first paper dealt with the Poly- 

 nesian languages in general and the Hawaiian 

 in particular, from the standpoint of compara- 

 tive philology. Similar constructions were 

 followed out in the Oceanic and Indo-European 

 tongues, and points of contact were noted be- 

 tween modern Hawaiian, on the one hand, and 

 French, German, Spanish, Italian and English, 

 on the other. In the last paper the author, 

 after recounting the trials that were made by 

 Mascart, nearly twenty j'earsago, to determine 

 the variation of the force of gravity from place 

 to place by means of a siphon barometer whose 

 short arm was closed and contained a certain 

 quantity of gas, referred to the experiments that 

 have lately been made by Mohn of Christiania, 

 according to a method that was reported to the 

 U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, in 1890, by 



