May 25, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



831 



apparatus, manuscripts, rare books, diplomas 

 medals and various other objects of historical 

 interest and demonstrated impressively the 

 value and usefulness of collections of this 

 kind. 



Throughout the United States there is un- 

 doubtedly scattered a large number of similar 

 objects and specimens of paramount historical 

 interest and significance left by departed na- 

 turalists and students, partly emigrants from 

 ■European and Central American States, which 

 after the demise of their owners have passed to 

 succeeding generations, perhaps as little under- 

 stood and appreciated, obsolete relics. Most 

 of such articles, even of more recent American 

 investigators and scholars sooner or later sink 

 into oblivion and frequently are lost. When 

 gathered by purchase, donation or bequest and 

 collected and preserved in one museum they 

 would form a comprehensive collection, valuable 

 and instructive for the history of chemistry and 

 pharmacy as well as of their foremost represen- 

 tative men of the past. 



Some such stray relics are to be found in a 

 number of the collections of American institutes 

 and universities, among them in the materia 

 medica collection of the National Museum at 

 Washington. They are the few remaining im- 

 plements of Joseph Priestley from his kitchen 

 laboratory in Northumberland, Pa., which will 

 be remembered by the surviving American 

 chemists who on August 1, 1874, assembled at 

 that secluded village in the beautiful Susque- 

 hanna valley in centennial commemoration of 

 the discovery of oxygen. Many interesting 

 objects from the laboratories and studies, as 

 well as an abundance of documents consisting 

 of books, diplomas, medals, manuscripts, cor- 

 respondence of American, chemists and natural- 

 ists of the departing century, now scattered and 

 concealed on the shelves of college museums 

 and in domestic shrines, when gathered and 

 united in a national museum, would at once 

 and still more in time form a memorable and 

 most valuable and interesting collection to 

 which the older generation of still living Amer- 

 ican chemists and scientists would not fail 

 sooner or later to contribute their share. 



In this way an historical library and museum 

 of chemistry and cognate sciences and arts 



could be realized in the course of time which 

 from the start would bear the impress of a na- 

 tional one and which in interest and value might 

 soon surpass the existing corresponding Euro- 

 pean libraries and museums. 



These random suggestions may be in place 

 and in time at the dawn of a new century. 

 They may also serve as a timely warning to all 

 interested in this matter against dispersing the 

 historical literary treasures and relics of the 

 past and against the untoward multiplication of 

 petty and inadequate historical libraries aud 

 collections as met with in the old and not less 

 in the new world. 



Feed. Hoffmann. 



Berlin, April, 1900. 



CEDAR COLLARS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC COAST 

 INDIANS. 



Editor of Sciknce : Can any one tell me 

 whether the cedar collars of the North Pacific 

 Coast Indians are made rights and lefts. In 

 Dr. Boas's paper in Report of U. S. National 

 Museum for 1895, on the Kwakiutl Indians 

 there are many examples of the cedar bark col- 

 lars figured, but it does not appear from the 

 drawings whether they are worn indifferently 

 on the right or left shoulder, that is, whether 

 the ornament is worn on a particular side. The 

 reason for asking is this : The Porto Rican stone 

 collars are rights and lefts. In the National 

 Museum collection of thirty, every one of them 

 is carefully carved to imitate the splice joint 

 shown perfectly in Dr. Boas's examples of cedar 

 bark. In the drama of the expulsion of the Can- 

 nibal, acted with so much spirit by these Indians 

 in Chicago, two men led the Cannibal to the fire, 

 each wearing a cedar bark collar. It requires 

 little imagination to transfer this scene to Porto 

 Rico, where stone collars in likeness of those of 

 bark would surround the necks of the captors, 

 one on the right hand, the other on the left, 

 wearing each the decoration outside. I dis- 

 covered twenty-five years ago that the Porto 

 Eican collars were rights and lefts, also that 

 the overlapping ornament at the side of each 

 stood for the sizing or wrapping of a hoop, but 

 then did not know that Dr. Boas's Kwakuitl 

 Indians were wearing homologous decorations. 

 O. T. Mason. 



