SIGNS OF THE NATIVES 45 



completely prepared in Kamchadal fashion, on which water 

 seemed to have been poured in order to extract the sweetness. '^ 

 I discovered further [not far from the fireplace] ^^ beside the 

 tree, on which there still were the live coals, a wooden apparatus 

 for making fire,^" of the same nature as those used in Kamchatka. 

 The tinder, however, which the Kamchadals make from a spe- 

 cies of grass, was here different, namely a species of fountain 



'8 The MS from here on is confused, and Pallas has taken considerable 

 liberty in editing it so as to make sense. The person copying Steller's 

 original seems to have transposed part of the matter, inasmuch as the 

 argument derived from the fire-making apparatus precedes the finding 

 of it. (S) 



This argument, which Pallas has abridged in the passage below, read- 

 ing in translation "From all this I think ... in their miserable 

 craft," in the MS is inserted at this point, between the sentence ending 

 with "in order to extract the sweetness" and the one beginning with 

 "I discovered further." The meaning of the first part of this argument 

 might possibly be rendered thus: "This grass is known to the Kamchadals 

 as kattch, to the Russians as sweet grass, and is a true species of Sphondyl- 

 ium. The outer part of the grass is scraped with mussel shells; in this 

 as well as in other ways of preparing and using it for food the Kamchadals 

 and Americans are one. In this respect they differ from the Tungus and 

 the Deer Koryaks (near neighbors of the Kamchadals) , who do not know 

 about the grass and do without it, just as, for lack of steel, they do 

 without steel in making fire." Steller gives a detailed description of sweet 

 grass, or sladkaya trava, in his "Beschreibung von dem Lande Kam- 

 tschatka, " 1774. PP- 84-87. Stejneger pictures and describes it from 

 Bering Island {Bull. U. S. Fish Comm., Vol. 16, 1896. p. 25 and PI. 15a); 

 likewise Suvorov in his "Komandorskie Ostrova," 1912 (p. 79 and 

 Fig. 13). It is the cow parsnip, Heracleum lanatiim Michx, The fact that 

 the pre-Linnaean name of the European species was Sphondylium ac- 

 counts for the reference in the MS. 



The second part of the argument is represented by Pallas' sentence 

 beginning "But if this is so" and by the statements translated below in 

 footnote 82. (G) 



'9 The bracketed words are in the MS only and help clarify the mean- 

 ing. 



80 The MS here has this additional characterization: "with which, 

 for lack of steel, they are in the habit of making fire by friction, just as 

 in Kamtchatka and other places in America," — in other words, a fire 

 drill. 



