
930 The American Naturalist. [October, 
offspring of our race is also connected by history with this earlier form, 
and, furthermore, close relation is traced between the bypaths of 
modern civilization and the outgrown forms of culture among which it 
originated.’’ 
The committee elected by the section were as follows: Fellow to the 
council, Rev, J. Owen Dorsey, Washington. Sectional committee, 
Prof. O. T. Mason, National Museum ; Prof. Thomas Wilson, National 
Museum ; Prof. George H. Perkins, University of Vermont. Member 
nominating committeé, Prof. Thos. Wilson. Subcommittee on nomi- 
nations, Prof. Paul Carus, editor Monist; Prof. C. P. Hart, Wyoming, 
Ohio; Mr. Walter Hough, National Museum. 
The meetings for reading papers commenced Thursday morning, 
August 20th, at 10 A.M. Prof. W. H. Leaman delivered an address on 
“ The Essentials of a Good Education, with a New Classification of | 
Knowledge.” Mr. Walter Hough gave a description of ‘‘ The Custom 
of Kava-Drinking as Practiced by the Papuans and Polynesians,” 
followed by Major J. W. Powell’s exhibition of his new linguistic 
map of the Indians of North America. . 
This map is the chef-d’ euvre of the Bureau of Ethnology, and one 
in which Major Powell takes much pride. It represents many years of 
patient, careful labor of himself and some of his most valuable assist- 
ants. It has been presented before in rather an inchoate form to 
several scientific societies, but now it has been completed and will 
appear in the next volume of the reports of the Bureau of Ethnology. 
It attempts to represent the locality of the various Indian tribes of 
North América at the beginning of history. As the Atlantic coast 
was occupied by white men much earlier than the interior and the 
„Pacific slope, so of course its representation on this map dates to an 
earlier time. Fifty-eight linguistic stocks or families are represented 
on the map, and these are divided into 264 dialects, representing as 
many different Indian tribes. The major said that over 1,000 Indian 
languages are spoken, which can be divided among seventy-five differ- 
ent stocks, and that while the number was large the tendency was- 
not toward multiplication, but toward a unification or parent stock. 
He explained his system of segration and aggregation, and said that 
this map represented our earliest knowledge of the locations of Indian 
tribes in North America as shown by their language. It might require 
correction in the future, according as our knowledge of them might 
increase. In conclusion he made some humorous remarks on Volapük | 
as a universal language, and compared it to the most barbaric of bar- 
baric tongues, and that it approached ‘closely primitive Indian tongues 


