546 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IV., No. 98. 



own with a tenacity somewhat surprising. If I ever 

 become possessed of a spinning-wheel, an article of 

 furniture now scarce in England, I can hardly get a 

 specimen better than in Pennsylvania, where ' my 

 great-grandmother's spinning-wheel ' is shown — 

 standing, perhaps in the lumber-room, perhaps in an 

 ornamental place in the drawing-room — often er than 

 in any other country that I ever visited. 



In another respect Pennsylvania has shown itself 

 to me fruitful of old-fashioned products. I was 

 brought up among the Quakers, — like so many, I dare 

 say, who are present; for the number of times in the 

 week, or even in the day, in which it occurs that 

 those whom one meets prove to be at least of Quaker 

 descent, represents a proportion which must be highly 

 pleasant to the Quaker mind. In the history of the 

 Society of the Friends, there has recently come out a 

 fact unknown, especially to the Friends themselves. 

 Their opinion has always been that they came into 

 existence in the neighborhood of 1600, by spontane- 

 ous generation, in an outburst of spiritual develop- 

 ment in England. It has now been shown, especially 

 by the researches of Robert Barclay (not the old con- 

 troversialist, but a modern historian), that the Qua- 

 kers were by no means the absolutely independent 

 creation that they and others had supposed them to 

 be; that they were derived from earlier existing 

 denominations by a process which is strictly that of 

 development. Their especial ancestors, so to speak, 

 were a division of the early Dutch sect known as 

 Mennonites. The Friends have undergone much 

 modification as to theological doctrine; but some of 

 their most pronounced characteristics, such as the 

 objection to war and oaths, and even details of cos- 

 tume, and the silent grace before meals, remain as 

 proofs of Mennonite derivation. To find the Men- 

 nonites least changed from their original condition 

 is now less easy in their old homes in Europe than 

 in their adopted homes in the United States and 

 Canada, whither they have migrated from time to 

 time, up till quite recently, in order to avoid being 

 compelled to serve as soldiers. They have long 

 been a large and prosperous body back in Pennsyl- 

 vania. I went to see them; and they are a very strik- 

 ing instance of permanency of institutions, where 

 an institution or a state of society can get into pros- 

 perous conditions in a secluded place, cut off from 

 easy access of the world. Among them are those 

 who dissent from modern alteration and changes by 

 a fixed and unalterable resolution that they will not 

 wear buttons, but will fasten their coats with hooks 

 and eyes, as their forefathers did. And in this way 

 they show with what tenacity custom holds when it 

 has become matter of scruple and religious sanction. 

 Others have conformed more and more to the world; 

 and most of those whom I have seen were gradually 

 conforming in their dress and habits, and showing 

 symptoms of melting into the general population. 

 But, in the mean time, America does offer the specta- 

 cle of a phase of religious life, which, though dwin- 

 dling away in the old-world region where it arose, 

 is quite well preserved in this newer country, for the 

 edification of students of culture. These people, who 



show such plain traces of connection with the his- 

 torical Anabaptists that they may be taken as their 

 living representatives, still commemorate in their 

 hymns their martyrs who fell in Switzerland for the 

 Anabaptist faith. There was given me only a few 

 days ago a copy of an old scarce hymn-book, ante- 

 rior to 1600, but still in use, in which is a hymn com- 

 memorative of the martyr Haslihach, beheaded for 

 refusing to conform to the state religion, whose head 

 laughed when it was cut off. 



Now, to find thus, in a secluded district, an old state 

 of society resisting for a time the modifying influences 

 which have already changed the world around, is no 

 exceptional state of things. It shows the very pro- 

 cesses of resisted but eventually prevailing alteration 

 which anthropologists have to study over larger re- 

 gions of space and time in the general development 

 of the world. In visiting my Mennonite friends in 

 Pennsylvania, I sometimes noticed, that, while they 

 thought it nothing strange that I should come to 

 study them and their history, yet when I was asked 

 where I was going next, and confessed with some 

 modesty that I was going with Major Powell to the 

 far west to see the Zunis, this confession on my 

 part was received with a look of amazement, not 

 quite unmingled with kindly reproof: it seemed so 

 strange to my friends that any person travelling 

 about of his own will should deliberately go to 

 look at Indians. I found it hard to refrain from 

 pointing out, that, after all, there is a communit. of 

 purpose between studies of the course of civilization, 

 whether carried out among the colonists of Pennsyl- 

 vania or among the Indians of New Mexico. Inves- 

 tigation of the lower races is made more obscure and 

 difficult through the absence of the guidance of writ- 

 ten history, but the principle is the same. 



A glance at the tribes whom Professor Moseley and 

 I have seen in the far west during the last few weeks 

 has shown one or two results which may be worth 

 stating; and one, merely parenthetical, I think I 

 must take leave to mention, though it lies outside the 

 main current of my subject. 



Our look at North-American Indians, of whom it 

 has been my lot to write a good deal upon second- 

 hand evidence, had, I am glad to say, a very en- 

 couraging effect; because it showed, that on the 

 whole, much as the writings of old travellers and 

 missionaries have to be criticised, yet if, when 

 carefully compared, they agree in a statement, per- 

 sonal inspection will generally verify that statement. 

 One result of our visit has been, not a diminution, but 

 an increase, of the confidence with which both of 

 us in future will receive the statements of travellers 

 among the Indians, allowing for their often being 

 based upon superficial observation. So long as we 

 confine ourselves to things which the traveller says he 

 saw and heard, we are, I believe, upon very solid 

 ground. 



To turn to our actual experiences. The things 

 that one sees among the Indian tribes who have not 

 become so 'white' as the Algonkins and the Iro- 

 quois, but who present a more genuine picture of old 

 American life, do often, and in the most vivid way, 



