336 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IX., No. 218 



made of the fibres of the agave. The men and 

 the women live in separate houses, and are never 

 allowed to be in one room. The man takes his 

 meals on a stone, between his house and that of 

 his wife. They eat Little meat, but live princi- 

 pally on vegetables, which are grown in small 

 gardens. Though many of them have become 

 Christians, they still adhere to their old religious 

 feasts and dances, which they perform at the 

 celebration of the saints of their villages. Each 

 tribe has its peculiar dances, which are accom- 

 panied by two kinds of flutes, marimbas, and 

 rattles. Sievers states that they believe a woman, 

 by the name of Inhimpitu, to have been ihe 

 mother of the ancestors of their gentes. These 

 ancestors created the earth, the houses, the sun, 

 — which formerly was buried in the ground,— 

 the moon, and the stars. Takina is their princi- 

 pal place of worship. Here rows of stones are 

 found, with interplaced granite bowlders. A 

 wizard watches this place, which no Spaniard is 

 allowed to visit. In a small temple, and two huts 

 which stand near by, various utensils used in the 

 worship are kept, — drums, flutes, masks, rattles, 

 and tripods made of wood. Under one of the 

 large bowlders is the grave of a wizard, to whom 

 they give offerings. The wizards cau^e disease by 

 throwing spiders, scorpions, or lizards into the 

 bodies of their enemies, and cure the sick by ex- 

 tricating the cause of the disease. They are not 

 allowed to eat any salt. During the great festi- 

 vals, which are celebrated in January, the Indians 

 must abstain from the meat of domesticated ani- 

 mals. At Masinga, on the upper Manzanares, 

 there are large ruins of a temple, and long, re- 

 markably straight roads leading to it. Ancient 

 roads are found in many parts of the Sierra, and 

 are frequently used for the construction of modern 

 roads. A grammar of the language of the 

 Arhuaco, the Koggaba, has heen published by 

 R. Caledon (' Gramatica de la lengua Koggaba,' 

 Paris, 1886). 



E. T. Hamy believes that the sinuous line which 

 is found on one of the monuments of Copan, in 

 Honduras, is identical with the Chinese Tai-Ki 

 {Journ. anthrop. inst., February, 1887). Though 

 these figures closely resemble one another, both 

 consisting of two semicircles lying in opposite 

 directions and touching each other, this is no 

 proof of a common origin and identical meaning. 

 The Chinese symbol represents two opposite prin- 

 ciples, — the active and passive spirits, the mascu- 

 line and feminine, light and darkness. The con- 

 clusion drawn from the similarity of ornaments 

 occurring in widely separated regions, upon the 

 identity of their symbolic meaning or their com- 

 mon origin, is fallacious. 



Chaffanjon, who is exploring the upper Orinoco, 

 found at Ature, in a cave of the Cerro de los 

 muertos, the burial-place of the Piaroas. The 

 corpses and those objects which had been most 

 valuable to the deceased are put into a kind 

 of basket, or into a cylinder made of twigs 

 arranged in parallel lines round the body and tied 

 together. Most of them are covered with stones 

 to keep them from being disturbed. In the cave 

 of Arvina, in Cerro Saloajito, Chaffanjon found 

 vases differing in style from those which Dr. 

 Creyaux found at Maipure. On the rocks of 

 Cerro Purtado he found large sculiDtures. From 

 his observations on these inscriptions he concludes 

 that extraordinary means and a long time were 

 required for making them. These petroglyphs 

 seem to be of frequent occurrence in those dis- 

 tricts. Recently A. Jahn found several in the 

 Loma de Maya, west of Caracas. One of them is 

 figured in the Zeitschrift filr Ethnologic (1886, p. 

 371). The commission for determining the bound- 

 ary between Brazil and Venezuela found others 

 on the left bank of the Guainia, between Solano 

 and Buena Vista. Similar rock inscriptions ai-e 

 found below Maroa. near San Gabriel, Itapini- 

 ma, and at other places, and, according to W. 

 Sievers, on the upper Manzanares. Chaffanjon 

 studied the dialects of the country he traversed, 

 and collected extensive vocabularies of the Bani- 

 ba, Piaroa, Guahiro, Puinabe, Piapoco, and some 

 of their grammatical elements. All of these be- 

 long to the same stock. 



GEOGRAPHICAL NOTES. 

 Europe. 



The government of Roumenia plans a triangula- 

 tion of that country. As the basis of the present 

 maps is founded on the reconnaissance made by 

 the Austrian army during the occupation of Rou- 

 menia in 1855, a thorough survey is very desirable 

 for completing our knowledge of the topography 

 of Europe. 



Asia. 



The following notes on the work of the Indian 

 survey are taken from Petermanri's Mittheilungen. 

 Besides the regular reports, the annual report for 

 1884 and 1885 contains the results of expeditions 

 made in the countries adjoining India. Col. R. 

 G. Woodthorpe visited the western head waters of 

 the Irawadi. — the Nam Kiu. He followed the 

 Dihing, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, to its 

 sources, crossed the Phungan Mountains at the 

 Chaukan Pass, and reached, south of the farthest 

 point reached by Wilcox in 1826, the Nam Lung, 

 which he descended to its confluence with the 



