40 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 



realization of this plan, owing largely to lack of funds for the employment of 

 assistants in preparing the materials. It is hoped, however, that such a series 

 of vocabularies, based on the published grammars and on the series of texts 

 above referred to, may be prepared for publication in the near future. Much 

 of the preliminary work has been done. There are, for example, extended 

 manuscript dictionaries of the Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Chinook, and Sioux, 

 but none of them is yet ready for the printer. 



The work on Part 2 of the Handbook of American Indian Languages is pro- 

 gressing satisfactorily. The sketch of the Takelma is in page form (pp. 1-296), 

 but Dr. Boas has undertaken the correlation of this sketch with the Takelma 

 Texts which meanwhile have been published by the University of Pennsylvania, 

 and a considerable amount of work remains to be done to finish this revision. 

 The Coos grammar is in galleys. The Coos Texts are at the present writing 

 being printed by the American Ethnological Society, and here also references 

 are being inserted. Dr. Leo J. Frachtenberg has continued his collection of 

 material for the handbook with commendable energy and intelligence. The 

 field work has been financially aided by Columbia University, partly through 

 a gift made by Mrs. Henry Villard and partly through funds provided by Mr. 

 Homer E. Sargent. It has also been possible to utilize for the work on the 

 Alsea the collections made at a former time by Prof. Livingston Parrand on an 

 expedition supported by the late Mr. Henry Villard. On his last expedition 

 Dr. Frachtenberg was able to determine that the Siuslaw is an independent 

 stock, although morphologically affiliated with the Alsea, Coos, and Siuslaw 

 group. He also collected extensive material on the Alsea and Molala. 



The most important result, which is appearing more and more clearly from 

 the investigations carried out under the direction of Dr. Boas, lies in the fact 

 that it will be possible to classify American languages on a basis wider than 

 that of linguistic stocks. In 1893 Dr. Boas called attention to the fact that 

 a number of languages in northern British Columbia seem to have certain 

 morphological traits in common, by which they are sharply differentiated from 

 all the neighboring languages, although the evidence for a common origin of 

 the stocks is unsatisfactory. Dr. Boas and his assistants have followed this 

 observation, and it can now be shown that throughout the continent languages 

 may be classed in wider morphological groups. It is interesting to note that 

 phonetic groups may be distinguished in a similar manner, but these do not 

 coincide with the morphological groups. These observations are in accord 

 with the results of modern inquiries in Africa and Asia, where the influence of 

 Hamitic phonetics on languages of the Sudan and the influence of Sumerian 

 •on early Babylonian have been traced in a similar manner. Analogous con- 

 ditions seem to prevail also in South Africa, where the phonetics of the Bush- 

 man languages have influenced the neighboring Bantu languages. In this way 

 a number of entirely new and fundamental problems in linguistic ethnography 

 have been formulated, the solution of which is of the greatest importance for 

 a clear understanding of the early history of the American Continent. 



The Handbook of American Indian Languages as planned at the present 

 time deals exclusively with an analytical study of the morphology of each 

 linguistic family, without any attempt at a detailed discussion of phonetic 

 processes, their influence upon the development of the language, and the rela- 

 tion of dialects. Dr. Boas recommends that the present Handbook of American 

 Indian Languages be followed by a series of handbooks each devoted to a 

 single linguistic stock, in which the development of each language, so far as it 

 can be traced by comparative studies, should be treated. 



The study of aboriginal American music was conducted among the Chippewa 

 Indians by Miss Frances Densmore, who extended her field of work previously 



