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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IV., No. 98. 



that its power of emitting a sound audible at a great 

 distance would suggest to Australians and Caff res 

 alike its usefulness at religious ceremonies from which 

 it was desired to exclude certain persons. Then we 

 are led to another argument, into which I will not 

 enter now, as to the question why women are excluded 

 in the most rigid manner from certain ceremonies. 

 But in any event, if we work it out as a mere ques- 

 tion of probabilities, the hypothesis of repeated re- 

 invention under like circumstances can hold its own 

 against the hypothesis of historical connection ; but 

 which explanation is the true one, or whether both 

 are partly true, I have no sufficient means to decide. 

 Such questions as these being around us in every 

 direction, there are only two or three ways known 

 to me in which at present students can attack them 

 with any reasonable prospect of success. May I 

 briefly try to state, not so much by precept as by ex- 

 ample, what the working of those methods is by 

 which it is possible, at any rate, to make some en- 

 croachments upon the great unsolved problem of 

 anthropology ? 



One of the ways in which it is possible to deal with 

 such a group of facts may be called the argument 

 from outlandishness. When a circumstance is so 

 uncommon as to excite surprise, and to lead one to 

 think with wonder why it should have come into 

 existence, and when that thing appears in two differ- 

 ent districts, we have more ground for saying that 

 there is a certain historical connection between the 

 two cases of its appearance than in the comparison 

 of more commonplace matters. Only this morning 

 a case in point was brought rather strongly under my 

 notice; not that the facts were unknown, for we have 

 been seeing them for days past at Zuni. The Indians 

 of the north, and especially the Iroquois, were, as 

 we know, apt to express their ideas by picture-writ- 

 ings, in the detailed study of which Col. Mallery is 

 now engaged. One sign which habitually occurs is 

 the picture of an animal in which a line is drawn 

 from the throat, through the picture of the animal, 

 terminating in the heart. Now, the North- American 

 Indians of the lake district have a distinct meaning 

 attached to this peculiar heart-line, which does not 

 attach to ordinary pictures of animals : they mean 

 some animal which is living, and whose life is affected 

 in some way by a charm of some kind. 



It is expressly stated by Schoolcraft that a picture 

 he gives of a wolf with such a heart-line means a 

 wolf with a charmed heart. It is very remarkable 

 to find, among the Zuiiis, representations of deer and 

 other animals drawn in the same manner ; and the 

 natural inference is, that the magic of the Iroquois and 

 the Zuiiis is connected, and of more or less com- 

 mon origin. I verified this supposition by asking Mr. 

 Cushing, our authority on Zuni language and ideas, 

 what idea was generally attached to this well-known 

 symbol ; and his answer was, that it indicated a living 

 animal on which magical influence was being exerted. 

 May we not, then, consider, — leaving out of the ques- 

 tion the point whether the Pueblo people invented the 

 heart-line as a piece of their magic and the nomad 

 tribes of the north picked it up from them, or whether 



it came down from the northern tribes and was 

 adopted by the southern, or whether both had it from 

 a common source, — that, at any rate, there is some 

 ground, upon the score of mere outlandishness, for 

 supposing that such an idea could not occur without 

 there being some educational connection between the 

 two groups of tribes possessing it, and who could 

 hardly have taken it by independent development ? 



To mention an instance of the opposite kind: I 

 bought a few days ago, among the Mojaves, a singular 

 article of dress, — a native woman's girdle, with its 

 long fringe of twisted bark. This, or rather two of 

 these put on so as to form one complete skirt, used 

 to be her only garment; and it is still worn from old 

 custom, but now covered by a petticoat of cotton, 

 generally made of several pocket-handkerchiefs in 

 the piece, bought from the traders. Under these cir- 

 cumstances, it has become useless as a garment, only 

 serving as what I understand is called in the civilized 

 world a 'dress-improver;' the effect of which, in- 

 deed, the Mojave women perfectly understand, and 

 avail themselves of in the most comic manner. Sup- 

 pose, now, that we had no record of how this fantastic 

 fashion came into use among them: it has only to 

 be compared with the actual wearing of bark gar- 

 ments in Further Asia and the Pacific Islands in order 

 to tell its own history, — that it is a remnant of the 

 phase of culture where bark is the ordinary material 

 for clothing. But the anthropologist could not be 

 justified in arguing from this bark-wearing that the 

 ancestors of the Mojaves had learned it from Asiatics. 

 Independent development, acting not only where 

 men's minds, but their circumstances, are similar, 

 must be credited with much of the similarity of 

 customs. It is curious that the best illustrations of 

 this do not come from customs which are alike in 

 detail in two places, and so may be accounted for, 

 like the last example, by emigration from one place 

 to another. We find it much easier to deal with 

 practices similar enough to show corresponding work- 

 ings of the human mind, but also different enough 

 to show separate formation. Only this morning I 

 met with an excellent instance of this. Dr. Yarrow, 

 your authority on the subject of funeral rites, de- 

 scribed to me a custom of the Utes of disposing of 

 the bodies of men they feared and hated by putting 

 them under water in streams. After much inquiry, 

 he found that the intention of this proceeding was to 

 prevent their coming back to molest the survivors. 

 Now, there is a passage in an old writer on West 

 Africa where it is related, that, when a man died, his 

 widow would have herself ducked in the river in 

 order to get rid of his ghost, which would be hang- 

 ing about her, especially if she were one of his most 

 loved wives. Having thus drowned him off, she was 

 free to marry again. Here, then, is the idea that 

 water is impassable to spirits, worked out in different 

 ways in Africa and America, but showing in both 

 the same principle; which, indeed, is manifested by 

 so many peoples in the idea of bridges for the dead 

 to pass real or imaginary streams, from the threads 

 stretched across brooks in Burmah for the souls of 

 friends to cross by, to Catlin's slippery pine-log for 



