RE-PRINTED FROM THE AM ERICAN ANTIQUARIAN, MAY, 1896. 
ETHNOGRAPHIC NOTES 
BY ALBERT S. GATSCH ET. ETHNOGRAPHIC NOTES. 
BY ALBERT S. GATSCHET, Washington, D. C. 
Father A. G. Morige, of the Order of Mary Immaculate, is the author 
of a Carrier Reading Book, published at Stuarts’ Lake Mission, British 
Columbia. The second edition has appeared in 1894, in the syllabic charac- 
ters invented by Morice in the latter part of 1885, and holds 192 duedecimo 
pages. The contents are chiefly devotional. The introduction of the Cree 
or Knistino syllabic characters had proved a failure in transcribing 
Carrier on account of the great difference of sounds in both languages, the 
Carrier or Taculli being of the Tinne family of languages. But the sylla- 
bary of Morice,being richer in signs, proved to be adequate to all the needs 
of missionaries or translators in rendering the language phonetically as 
faithfully as possible. Individuals of any of the D£ne tribes will learn 
with great facility to read Dene or Tinne-texts when printed or even writ- 
ten with this syllabary, but Selish and Chinook dialects will not be trans- 
cribed with ease by means of Morice’s system. 
The Sacred Pole of the Omaha Indians was placed for safe keeping 
in the Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., in i888, and the 
contents of the two sacred tents of war of that famous tribe were trans- 
mitted there four years earlier. These objects are now saved from de- 
struction (it was once intended to bury them with the chiefs charged with 
their keeping), and form a group of highly interesting relics. Miss Alice 
C. Fletcher, to whose zeal the preservation of the pole and the other' 
articles is mainly due, gives their legend in an article read before the 
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1895, pp. 270-280. 
A large amount of Omaha mythology is clustering around these relics, and 
requires attentive reading for its full comprehension. In Omaha and Ponka 
the sacred pole is called wa-ghdhe-ghe, which means, expressed in a cir- 
cumscriptive manner, “ what has the power to place the mark of honor upon 
the daughter of a chief.” The same volume also contains an article of the 
same author — Indian Songs and Music. In this field of research Miss 
Fletcher has advanced our knowledge more than anybody else, as is fully 
attested by her monograph, “A Study of Omaha Indian Music ” (Peabody 
Mus. Publications), which was well received by the critical press of America 
as well as of Europe. A study of Long Island local history is William Wallace Tooker’s 
monograph, published by Francis P. Harper, New York, 1896, octavo 
(pp. 8 and 60) : John Eliot's first, Indian teacher and interpreter, “ Cock- 
enoe-de-Long-Island, and the story of his career from the early records.” 
The frontispiece gives an engraving of Indian graves on Montauk promon- 
tory. Cockenoe was a young Indian who went east and helped Rev. John 
Eliot in the earliest of his endeavors to write down the Massachussetts 
Indian dialect. In 1646 Mr. Eliot first preached in Indian, and shortly 
after Cockenoe appears as his interpreter. Indeed one of the significations 
of this verb kukkinneau is that of “ he interprets.” The last documentary 
mention of him is dated August 3, 1687, in the Montauk deed of convey- 
ance to the inhabitants of East Hampton, L. I. 
The Creek War of 1813 and 1814 has been a frequent object of his- 
torical description. Meek, Pickett, Drake, Claiborne, Woodward and 
many others have, with industry and perseverance, tried to obtain all infdr- 
mation on this fearful struggle which it was possible for them to obtain. 
They represented the events with all the art and skill they were capable of. 
When Woodward published his “Reminiscences” (1859), there were still 
alive a number of people, Indians and whites, who had taken part in the 
war, and even the latest book on the subject, “ The Creek War of 1813 
and 1814,” by H. S. Halbert and T. H. Ball, avails itself of unpublished 
materials, most of which have come down to our times in the form of manu- 
scripts (Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1895, pp. 331, 12 mo.). The 
historic narrative of these authors is attractive, more circumstantial than 
that of their predecessors, and full of new statements never before pub- 
lished. Particular attention is paid to the causes and origi\i of the war, 
which was instigated through the British, especially by the agency of the 
celebrated Tecumseh, chief of the Shawnees, who was full of hatred against 
the American settlers in the border states. 
Dr. Nicholas Le6n is one of the few Mexican scientists who constantly 
remain active in the dissemination of knowledge of the Indian antiquities, 
folk lore, customs, and native languages of that interesting, but too little 
explored country. He has republished several manuals, catechisms and 
dictionaries of the Tarasca, Zapotec and other native languages, also the 
“ Museo Michoacano,” or periodical for the study mainly of the Tarascan 
people and tongue. Just now the first installment has reached this office of 
his “ Diccionario popular y manual de historia antigua de Mexico,” in 
sedecimo size, and in two columns of Spanish text. This specimen copy 
contains the biography of the Mexican “Emperor” Ahuitzotl, the eighth 
ruler of Tenochtitlan, whose rule began in the year 1846. Illustrated 
articles are to follow on ethnography, anthropology, languages and on 
other cognate subjects. Dr. Ledn’s residence is in Guadelupe-Hidalgo, 
Federal District of Mexico, Mexico, and to that locality orders for his pub- 
lications may be addressed. 
Dr. Philipp J. J. Valentini has recently published Part II of his 
“ Analysis of the Pictorial Text Inscribed on two Palenque Tablets ” in the 5 
I 
Proceeding's of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, 1896). In 
the first part the author had endeavored to prove that in these two Palenque 
tablets no images comparable to alphabetic characters were found form- 
ing the components of the engraved text, for the 201 images on them turned 
out to be true pictographs of natural or manufactured objects. They are of 
a ritual character. Now Part II attempts to ascertain what special message 
these two tablets were intended to deliver to posterity. Quite a number of 
calendar dates are registered on one tablet, and, Dr. Valentini finds that 
they amount to forty-seven, and occupy nearly one-half of all the squares 
into which the tablet is divided. Tablet I is subdivided by spaces showing 
the records of several persons, but the long and uninterrupted record of 
Tablet II has to be assigned to but one person, and is the record of the 
priest entombed in the locality. The two tablets are reproduced pictorially 
in the first part of Valentini’s article, and a comprehensive account of all the 
three tablets was in 1879 composed by Charles Rau, then the archaeologist 
of the Smithsonian Institution. 
Henry Pittier, a native of Switzerland (southwestern part), who is 
the director and one of the most active teachers in the Instituto fisico-geo- 
grafico at San Jose, Costa Rica, has published many useful researches on 
his adoptive country (travels, topography, Indian linguistics, history, etc ), 
all of which were printed at San Jose at public expense. His travels and 
documentary studies furnished many interesting data for the work he is 
issuing just now, “ Geographic Names of Costa Rica.” The first volume 
deals with the Talamanca district only, holds 46 octavo pages, and explains, 
or attempts to explain, about 300 local names of that distant country. 
Most of them belong to the Indian languages spoken at the present time in 
that province, and it has been ascertained that all Indian dialects of Costa 
Rica belong to one family only. 
The Kariri language belongs to the mountains of Northern Brazil, 
and in former times when the Portuguese settled in these parts, the Cairirls 
or Kiriris with the two sub-tribes of the Sabujasand Pimenteiras were living 
in the mountainous ridges between the River San Francisco and the Rivers 
Curd and Acaracu on the north. The nation possesses no common name, 
and the explorer Philip Martius, who in 1818 heard that about 600 indi- 
viduals were still in existence, believes that the stock of the nation once 
came from the unexplored interior of the Guyana highlands. From Mami- 
ani, a missionary of the seventeenth century, we possess a grammar and a 
catechism (Lisbon 1698, 12 mo.). Another catechism, by R. P. Bernardo 
de Nantes, was published first in Lisbon in 1709. He was a Capuchin 
monk and his works are now exceedingly rare, as appears from the preface 
of Dr. Julius Platzmann’s fac-simile edition, which this indefatigable lin- 
guist has just made public in the original duodecimo size : “Catecismo da 
lingua Kariris, composto pelo R. P. Fray Bernardo de Nantes ; publicado 
de novo por Julio Platzmann. Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1896. pp. 363.” This 
reimpression may be called a model of modern typography ; from it the 
language of the Kariri, which was also that of the Sabujii, appears to have 
had vocalic endings in its words, many difficult consonantic articulations 6 
and a structure, which was not polysynthetic to excess. The Portuguese 
translation stands opposite the Kariri text on every page, which makes the 
analysis of the sentences possible without a dictionary. This group of 
mountain dialects form a linguistic family by itself, and the attempts to 
connect it with the Tupi family have not been successful. 
The publications of Dr. Rodolfo Lenz, professor of the Pedagogic 
Institute of Chile, have, since our last notice of them, considerably increased 
in number. They all refer to languages spoken by the Chilean Indians, 
especially with dialects of the Arauco family. Thus we have : “ Intro- 
duccion a los estudios araucanos (grammatic elements of the Araucan 
language, and a letter of Padre Febres, pp. 51). Glosario de la lingua 
Atacamena—the beginning of the dictionary of a language spoken near 
and in the desert of Atacama, to the north of Chile. The Atacameno was 
long supposed to be a language not affiliated to any other, but apparently 
there is a genealogical connection with one of the northern stocks of South 
American languages. Dialogos araucanos en dialecto huilliche; 371 sen- 
tences with interlinear translation by R. Lenz, pp. 35. Der Ausbruch des 
Vulcans Calbuco ; a short relation of that event, in an Araucanian dialect, 
with interlinear translation in German, and some remarks in form of a 
commentary. Dialogos araucanos en dialecto picunche, with Spanish in- 
terlinear translation, and commentary, pp. 60.’’ 
All these articles were printed in Santiago de Chile, 1895 to 1896, in uni- 
form large octavo size ; some in the Anales de la Universidad de Chile, 
others in the Transactions of the German Scientific Society in Santiago. 
New Guslar Songs.— The latest of the Guslar or Slavic troubadour 
songs published in the Slavonic dialect of the middle Danube River is of 
Moslimic, not of Christian origin, its title being, “ Bojagic Allies Gluck 
und Grab A The learned editor, Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss, of Vienna, has 
published it in Schmeltz’s Internationales Archiv fur Ethnographic, Vol. 
IX, pp. 1—41 (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1896), adding a German translation in the 
metre of the original and a commentary. Everybody who reads these two 
texts will assume that they were the product of one poet, but the editor 
positively states that they come from two different authors. The manner 
in which they are joined together proved conclusively that by a proceeding 
of this sort whole epic poems of any length can be formed, as we see it in 
the Homeric poems and in the Kalevala. The Moslem nobleman Bojagic 
has heard of the consummate beauty of the daughter of the commander of 
Ivarlstadt [Transsylvania], and is slain in the attempt to abduct her. The 
title of the first Guslar song is “ Halilen’s Brautfahrt,” relating the crim- 
inal abduction of the girl and the massacre of her Moslemic lover, while 
the second song, “ Halilens’ Grab,” describes the nightly desecration of the 
nobleman’s grave in that melancholic and touching strain for which the 
poetry of all Slavic nations are so well known. 
Three other Guslar songs worded in the same dialect, edited and trans- 
lated into German by Dr. F. Krauss at the same time as the Bojagic song 
previously mentioned, have reference to the wars and expeditions made by 
Bavarian armies into the southern Slavonic countries east of Bavaria. r£he 7 
first song celebrates the Turkish attacks upon Vienna, the capital, and was 
brought to paper by Krauss in December 1884 ; the second, on the death 
of the Bavarian King, noted at Lubovija in February 1885. The third is a 
ceremonial chant upon the wedding of the commander (ban) of Munich ; 
Krauss wrote it down in January 1885 from the dictation of a Catholic 
named Hija Hercegovac. Published in Reinhard-Stdttner’s “ Bavarian 
Researches,” vol. IV ; 1896. 
The Globus, a German illustrated weekly periodical, published at 
Braunschweig by the veteran geographer, Dr. Richard Andree, and de- 
voted to ethnography, geology, prehistorics and travels, as well as to archae- 
ology and natural sciences, has begun its 69th volume on January 1st, 1896 
(one volume semi-annually). The periodical was founded 1862 by Karl 
Andree, and in 1894 was united with “Ausland,” the tendency of which 
was closely allied to that of the “Globus.” In this age of advanced 
progress in all human endeavors, “Globus” is certainly one of the fore- 
most magazines, and if some of its articles should appear too erudite to 
some of its critical readers, there are others which appeal to the popular 
mind, and can be understood by any one whose education has not been 
totally neglected. In geography, African exploration, in which everbody’s 
attention is now engaged, has been treated in a large number of articles 
and graphically represented by photographs, many of Dr. Andree’s cor- 
respondents being explorers themselves. In Vol. 67 (January to June, 1895,) 
North and South America were spoken of in numerous articles by authors 
like Dr. Sapper, Steffens, Greim, Kobelt, Emil Schmidt, W. J. Hoffman, 
von Ihering, Hauthal, K. von den Steinen, Polakowski. These well-known 
authors have written on — Researches on Mount Elias, Statistics of the 
Colored Race in the United States, Inquiries on Indian Anthropology, 
Superstitions in the Southern States, the Free Communities of Indians 
within the Peninsula of Yucatan (with map), the Tonanamatl, Crossing of 
Puerto Rico, the Climate of Ceara in Brazil, the Stone Age in Paraguay, 
the Araucanians in their present condition, Emigration from Java to 
Venezuela, etc. 
“Contributions to Anthropology from an Ethnic Standpoint” 
is the title of a recent publication of Prof. Dr. Adolf Bastian, Director of 
the Ethnologic Department of the Berlin Royal Museums, published in two 
sections and illustrated. (Berlin : Reimer, publisher, 1895 ; octavo, pp. 170 
and I49, with prefaces). The work is written in German, the title being : 
“Zur Lehre vom Menschen in ethnischer Anthropologie.” The author 
gives a sketch of the various oriental notions on the conception of the 
deity, of demons, of tutelary genii, resurrection of body and soul, the various 
opinions about the abode of the soul after decease, the difference estab- 
lished between the soul of the living and the dead ; also, definitions of the 
plant-soul or life-principle in vegetals. The author is fond of using the 
parenthesis in the finishing of his sentences, but this habit creates a peculiar 
difficulty for the comprehension of his ideas. Numerous examples are 
brought together from all parts of the known world, more especially from 8 
Oceanica and the east coast of Asia and Mexico, many being brought in in 
the aboriginal languages and confronted with the dictums of the wise men 
of Rome, Greece and the Orient. 
The Searcher, an American “Notes and Queries,” is the octavo pe- 
riodical which is now published to replace the old “American Notes and 
Queries.” Its publisher and editor has remained the same : A. Estoclet, 
619 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa. It is issued semi-monthly and the 
yearly subscription is $2.00. The contents are as multifarious and interest- 
ing as ever, and if any one has any literary, historical or linguistic points to 
elucidate, on which he wants more information, this sheet is the best means 
to make one’s wants known. The latest number of the New Series just pub- 
lished is No. 14 of Vol. I, which corresponds to Vol. X, No. 14 of the Old 
Series.