248 General Notes. { March, 
thé St. Louis Academy of Science upon the prosecution of an 
investigation so thorough that it will never need to be repeated. 
THE Stupy oF Inp1an LancuaGes.—Major J. W. Powell has just 
issued a second edition of “ Introduction tothe Study of Indian Lan- 
guages, with phrases and sentences to be collected. Washington, 
1880.” Although purporting to relate to language alone, the 
work covers ,the whole ground of anthropological research, 
Chapter 1 is a discussion of the alphabet, together with the best 
method of transliterating an Indian language. Chapter 1 is 
headed Hints and Explanations, and is a preparation for the lists of 
phrases and sentences to be collected in the schedules. ‘These 
are divided into thirty-two sections, treating of persons, parts of 
the body, dress and ornaments, dwellings, implements and utensils, 
food, colors, numerals, measures, divisions of time, standards of 
value, animals, plants, geographic terms, geographic names, the 
firmament and meteorologic phenomena, kinship, social organiza- 
tion, government, religion, mortuary customs, medicine, amuse- 
ments, new words, accidence, pronouns and transitive verbs, 
possession, intransitive verbs and the other parts of speech 
c od 
studying materials collected, the rank of Indian languages. Chap- 
ter 111 is a collection of schedules containing a great variety of 
questiohs in order to bring out the truth with reference to each 
of the subjects named above. 
In the back of the volume is a set of kinship charts which 
embrace both consanguinity and affinity for nine generations, 
including that of ego, four above ego, and four below ego. 
Instead of using the old-fashioned circles for the individuals 
in the group, found in Mr. Morgan’s tables and elsewhere, the tri- 
angulat characters used by the Indians themselves to denote man 
and woman are worked up with a series of colors so as to present 
to the eye at a single view, ali the facts desired. 
The alphabet presents a few innovations, which are usually 
very undesirable, but which in this case are on the whole an 
improvement, since they substitute a plain letter, which may be 
found in any printing office, for characters and logographs diffi- 
cult to reproduce. 
A Pre-nistoric Rock Retreat—In January, 1876, the late 
S. S. Haldeman, Professor of comparative philology at the Uni- 
versity of Philadelphia, discovered on his farm near Chickies, 
Pa., upon the eastern bank of the Susquehanna river, a rock 
retreat of the prehistoric age, which yielded him, when he ex- 
plored it with the spade, a large number of stone implements, 
and proved to be a locality where the occupation of arrow- 
making had been followed for a long lapse of time. This re- 
several printed communications by Professor Haldeman, the last 
of which was the one read before the American Philosophical 
