1897.] Anthropology. 359 
examined, more generally reveal this method of Aboriginal con- 
struction, not as evidence of a unique type of culture, a “ lost race,” 
or a phase of human development, but as a common adaptation of the 
life of savage peoples, ancient and modern, to their daily environment. 
To what extent the hybrid Seminoles of Creek origin and post Spanish 
advent had intermingled with remnants of older tribes (presumably 
the builders of the Ten Thousand Islands villages) encountered by the 
first Spanirds in Florida, is unknown, but I heard no mention of pile 
construction as practiced by modern Seminoles at the meeting of the 
American Philosophical Society when the recently excavated-pile 
structures of the neighboring Ten Thousand Islands were discussed. 
—H. C. MERCER. 
The Grooved Stone Axe in South America.—The idea of 
the Ethnic unity of American Indians is strengthened by the fact that 
so common an implement of their stone age as the axe should have been 
hafted among them in a peculiar fashion (namely, by means of a 
groove), unknown, it seems, in all other parts of the world except 
Australia. Continuing to find these grooved stone axes throughout 
South America adds strength to this interesting contrast between 
the ancient handicraft of the new and old world, though it ap- 
pears that the wide distribution of the grooved axe south of Panama 
has not been often noted. The Columbian Exhibition at Madrid, in 
1892, showed a grooved axe (in the Pedro Baranda collection) from 
Campeche and a number of others from Ecuador, which could 
not have been distinguished from Delaware Valley specimens. One 
came from Nicarauga, another from Peru, and several from Bolivia, 
together with a curious specimen, the base of the groove of which was 
marked with spiral flutings. Several such axes had been collected 
among the Tarasco Indians in Mexico, and other typical familiar- 
looking specimens came from Uruguay with neighbors from the Ar- 
gentine Republic. Not a few of the axe-like forms from Uruguay, 
Equador, Nicaragua and the United States of Columbia had round 
(pounding) or pointed (piercing) rather than blade-like (cutting) ends, 
and round stones, encircled by grooves of the Sioux hammer pattern, 
were sometimes noticed, as, for instance, in Equador and Uruguay. 
That similar mallets (though never axes) hafted on the grooves were com- 
mon in prehistoric Spain, was shown by a number of ancient Iberian 
specimens photographed by me at the Museo National, Madrid. Mortil- 
let figures them from Italy, and the Swedish Government exhibited ex- 
amples at the Columbian Exhibition above-named from the east Sibe- 
