340 



KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



BOOK NOTICES. 



North American Aborigines. Report of the Peabody Museum, i88i. 



It is gratifying to see that the latest report of the Peabody Museum of Amer- 

 ican Archseology and Ethnology is paying much more attention to the descrip- 

 tion of living nations and tribes than to the enumeration of the implements and 

 classification of the dry bones of extinct and nameless populations. The study of 

 living tribes is the principal key for archaeologic research, and ought to be pur- 

 sued with might by us as long as there are any genuine Indians living in North 

 America. Archaeology can never become a real science, unless we are enabled 

 to assign the true date and nationality to the relics and finds stored up in our 

 museums, and this aim can only be reached, if attainable at all, by studying the 

 aborigines of our days. Impelled by this consideration, the author who furnished 

 five articles for the i6th and 17th Report (Cambridge, 1884,) before us, has en- 

 deavored to transmit the impressions, as graphically as possible, which she received 



