SCIENCE. 



137 



species, Pronuba maculata, Prodoxus marginatus, P. citierius, 

 P. anescens and P. intennedius), are described, and the paper 

 concludes with remarks which point to these diffent Yucca 

 Moths as admirable illustrations of the derivative origin of 

 species. 



THE WYANDOTTES. 



By Major J. W. Powell. 



The Indians now known as the Wyandottes, were first 

 found on the lower St. Lawrence. Subsequently they in- 

 habited a narrow district of country on the shores of Lake 

 Huron, and were known as the Hurons ; later they lived in 

 Michigan about Detroit ; then in Ohio in what is known as 

 Wyandotte county ; from Ohio they were moved to Kansas 

 and placed on a reservation ; and from Kansas to the Indian 

 Territory. In their wanderings irom point to point, as 

 they were driven from advancing civilization, a few of their 

 number were left behind, so that the Wyandottes are scat- 

 tered from the lower St. Lawrence to the Indian Territory 

 along the route of their migration. These Indians call 

 themselves Wundat ; the etymology of the word is not 

 known. In their social organization four units are recog- 

 nized — the family, the gens, the phratry and the tribe. The 

 family, as the term is here used, is nearly synonymous with 

 household. It is composed of the persons who occupy one 

 lodge, or, in their permanent wigwams, one section of a 

 communal dwelling. The head of the family is a woman. 

 The gens is an organized body of consanguineal kindred in 

 the female line. " The woman carries the gens," is the for- 

 mulated statement by which a Wyandotte expresses the idea 

 that descent is in the female line. Each gens has the name 

 of some animal — the form of such animal being its tutelar 

 god. Up to the time when the tribe left Ohio, eleven gentes 

 were recognized as follows : Deer, Bear, Highland Turtle 

 (striped), Highland Turtle (black), Mud Turtle, Smooth large 

 Turtle, Hawk, Beaver, Wolf, Sea Snake, Porcupine. In 

 speaking of an individual he is said to be a Wolf, a Bear, 

 or Deer, as the case may be, meaning thereby that he 

 belongs to that gens ; but in speaking of the body of people 

 comprising a gens they are said to be relatives of the Wolf, 

 the Bear, or the Deer, as the case may be. 



There are four phratries in the tribe — the three gentes, 

 Bear, Deer and Striped Turtle constituting the first ; the 

 Highland Turtle, Black Turtle and Smooth Large Turtle 

 the second ; the Hawk, Beaver and Wolf the third ; and 

 the Sea-snake and Porcupine the fourth. The eleven gentes 

 as four phratries constitute the tribe. 



The civil government inheres in a system of councils and 

 chiefs. In each gens there is a council composed of four 

 women. These four women councilors select a chief of 

 the gens from its male members ; that is, from their brothers 

 and sons. This gentile chief is the head of the gentile 

 council. The council of the tribe is composed of the ag- 

 gregated gentile councils. The tribal council, therefore, is 

 composed one-fifth of men and four-fifths of women. 



The government of the Wyandottes, with the social organ- 

 ization upon which it is based, affords a typical example of 

 tribal government throughout North America. Within that 

 area there are several hundred distinct governments. In so 

 great a number there is great variety, and in this variety we 

 find different degrees of organization, the degree of organi- 

 zation being determined by the differentiation of the func- 

 tions of government and the correlative specialization of 

 organic elements. 



A SIMPLE DEVICE FOR PROJECTING THE VI- 

 BRATIONS OF LIQUID FILMS WITHOUT A 

 LENS. 



By H. S. Carhart, A. M., Professor of Physics and Chemistry, 

 Northwestern University, Evanston, 111. 



This instrument is designed to project upon the screen 

 the vibrations of a film of soapy water produced by the voice 

 or by an organ pipe. It might be called the self-projecting 

 phoneidoscope. It differs from Sedley Taylor's phoneido- 

 scope in three particulars : first, the vibrations are commu- 



nicated to the film through the agency of a mouthpiece and 

 a ferrotype diaphragm ; second, the vibrations are projected 

 on a screen ; third, the film is employed to project itself 

 without a lens. 



It consists of a wooden tube, having a telephone mouth- 

 piece at one end and expanding into a large funnel at the 

 other, the funnel being of metal. In the side of the tube a 

 stop-cock is inserted. A film is obtained in the open end 

 of the funnel and a little air is then blown through the stop- 

 cock. This distends the film slightly, causing it to act as a 

 convex mirror. It is then placed in a beam of sunlight and 

 reflects it at the proper angle. Upon singing a note at the 

 mouthpiece a sharply defined system of waves is projected. 

 Photographs of these have been taken. Caps fitting into 

 the funnel and provided with a square or triangular open- 

 ing, are also employed to give films of different shape. 



THE LANGUAGES OF THE IROQUOIS. 



By Mrs. E. A. Smith. 



The language of each nation represents its thought. If 

 these thoughts have remained unrecorded, it is from the 

 language itself that they must be obtained by tracing out 

 the origin, history and meaning of its words. Each word 

 has its history, which it can be made to reveal by tracing 

 out the origin, history and their most hidden secrets, and 

 the thoughts, customs and beliefs of the originator be read 

 as truthfully as if recorded by the historian's pen. For 

 " words unaided cannot lie ; " twenty words in Tuscarora 

 represent supernatural beings. Does this leave a doubt as 

 tj the tendency of their minds ? The Tuscarora word for 

 burial ground signifies " placed in the ground in a sitting 

 posture," proving that some time in the past such was their 

 method of burial. The very structure of the Indian lan- 

 guages, where the words are so self-explaining, affords un- 

 limited scope to the etymologist in his search into word 

 history. There are two distinct periods in the modern his- 

 tory of the Iroquois. The inundation of new ideas on the 

 advent of the white man introduced almost a new vocabu- 

 lary, differing according to the ideas of the observers. For 

 instance, the horse when first seen by the Senecas was 

 drawing logs, hence was called a log drawer. Another 

 tribe saw it carrying packs, and termed it pack-carrier. 

 The Tuscaroras adopted the English word and term it ha- 

 hath. It is quite remarkable that so few words have been 

 borrowed from the English. And these have become so 

 Indianized by prefixes and appendages or changes in their 

 vowel sounds as to be scarely recognizable. Among them 

 are : U-ts — oats ; Sa-i tar — cider ; Ha-hass — horse ; Vi-ni- 

 gair — vinegar ; Qui-tair — Peter ; Ta-wait — David ; Tju-rus 

 — Julius ; Nay-yak-it-ando — jacket. Lastly was-tun for 

 Boston, adding to this the plural suffix ha-kah, a term 

 which in English might be interpreted ites. We have 

 then Was-tun-ha-kah, or Bostonites, which in the Iro- 

 quois is the general term for Americans or the whole 

 American nation. This almost supernatural intuition of 

 the Indian mind crystallizes, I do not doubt, the opinion 

 also and belief of at least 250,000 pale faces residing in the 

 metropolis of Massachusetts. Of the length of some of 

 incorporative words, which sometimes contain verb, sub- 

 ject, object, adjective or preposition, I would remark that 

 the examples generally given in encyclopedias and works 

 on language are almost entirely English Indian. That is, 

 a missionary, perhaps, translating a portion of the Bible, 

 finds some abstract word entirely beyond the comprehension 

 of the Indian mind-; he therefore takes Webster's definition 

 of the word and translates that into the Indian in the form 

 of one word until it has the appearance of the heading to a 

 German railway time-table, the words consisting sometimes 

 of forty letters and eleven or twelve syllables. The longest 

 word thus Anglo-Indianized with which I have met is the 

 Mohawk word for stove polish, the word itself being as in- 

 dicative of the ingenuity of the inventor as the polish itself. 

 It consisted of a glowing description of all the excellencies 

 of said stove polish, which it required filty-eight letters to 

 express. The abstract nouns, represented as being absent 

 from many of the Indian languages, are found in the Tus- 

 carora, such as life, death, love, hate. An interesting 

 feature of the language also might be traced in the prefer- 



