The value of wild rice to the Wisconsin Indians of early days can scarcely be estimated." They were barely beginning to turn their attention to agriculture.20 The abundance of this crop, the ease with which it was harvested and transported to their homes, and the facts that it required no labor in preparing the ground and no care while coming to maturity rendered it easily their most important vegetable food. It was one of their staples of subsistence, far more important to them than corn.21

There were two centers of Indian population in the district that is now Wisconsin-one along the southern shore of Lake Superior, well toward its western end, and the other in Fox River valley. The first was composed chiefly of Ojibwa, and the latter of Menomini, Potawatomi, Sauk and Fox, Mascoutin, Miami, and Kikapu, in straggling order. Both regions were very good for fishing and fair for the hunting of large game, but undoubtedly the prime cause of the location of the Indian villages was the great crops of wild rice to be obtained in each place with the outlay of little labor." The immense acreage and the dense growth insured a bountiful harvest to every one who was willing to work. In some parts of Fox river this grain grew so densely that passages for boats had to be cut through it, and in one place it spread over an area five miles long by two miles wide.23 When we read of one small lake which would furnish a supply for 2,000 Indians, and then realize that this region was full of lakes and streams choked with wild rice, it comes forcibly upon us that here in truth was an Indian paradise.

MICRONESIAN POPULATION. The Micronesian population amounts to from 12,000 to 13,000, and no decrease appears to take place, the northern islands having decidedly more inhab

19 See Warren, op. cit., pp. 40, 156, and 175; Parkman, La Salle, etc., p. 52, note; Newberry in Pop. Sci. Monthly, vol. xxxii, p. 39.

20 See Marquette, Relation, 1671; also Warren, op. cit., p. 40. For general discussion, see the admirable chapter on Aboriginal America in E. J. Payne's History of America, vol. 1.

21 Rev. C. Verwyst in a personal letter. My half-blood friend also writes: "It is presumed to have been the main source of food outside of meat, maple sugar, and fish." See also Relations, 1658, p. 21.

22 S. S. Hebberd. Wisconsin under French Dominion, p. 36.

23 G. W. Featherstonhaugh. Voyage up the Minnay-Sotor, p. 184.

itants than in Chamisso's time. A census taken on Nauru in 1891 and 1893 showed the surprising rate of increase of fifteen per thousand per annum. The density is also fairly high, being sixty-eight to the square mile. A physical deterioration of the race seems due to the prevalence of syphilis, by which 50 per cent of the inhabitants are attacked. The population belongs. to four sharply defined classes. The great mass consists of the common people (Kayur). The next higher class is that of the Leataketak, comparable to village magistrates in Germany, who see that the orders of the chiefs are carried out. Neither of these classes owns land, but they are allowed to grow as much produce or catch as much fish as is necessary for their sustenance. They have to perform certain services for the chiefs, such as the cutting of copra. The ordinary chiefs, Burak, rank above both of these classes, and they often possess larger holdings than the Iroj, or head chiefs. All the members of these four classes acquire their rank through the mother only. The son of a woman of the Iroj class is always an Iroj, even though the father be a common Kayur. The power and dignity of the chiefs is still considerable, and the judicial observance of the people still gives them the power of life and death.-Steinbach in Geographical Journal, March, 1896.

THE BLOODY LAKE. This is not the title of a somber melodrama or of a feuilleton filled with blood-curdling adventures; it is simply the vernacular in which the pretty Lake Morat in Switzerland is recognized by the peasant fisherman. Upon its picturesque shores Charles le Téméraire, the last Duke of Bourgogne, and his Bourguignons were literally "wiped out" by the Swiss troops in 1476 and thrown into the lake. The old fishermen, when the rays of the setting sun illuminate the bewitched waters and bring out their sinister coloring, say, "It is the blood of the Bourguignons!" This coloration is due-it is a pity to destroy the myth-to the presence in great abundance of a little aquatic plant named by the botanists Oscillatoria rubescens. Italler, in 1768, and Candolle, in 1825, wrote interesting monographs on it. The singular fact is that the waters of Lake Morat are the only ones which develop this curious plant. The waters of the other Swiss lakes, like the waters of the sea, vary in color, due to the presence of organic substances, animal or vegetable.

RACIAL ANATOMICAL PECULIARITIES *

D. K. SHUTE, M. D.

The structural peculiarities of different peoples have interested me greatly since an early period in my anatomical studies when, as prosector to the Chair of Anatomy in the Columbian Medical School, I found in the human subject the rare muscle known as the levator claviculæ, and listened with pleasure to the enthusiastic explanation of its significance given by Dr Elliott Coues, the distinguished ornithologist, then professor of anatomy at that school.

During the whole course of his teaching Dr Coues always insisted upon the importance of studying variations, and his influence still continues in the school, for demonstrators and students are always requested to report at once any deviations from the "normal" structure that they may find in the course of their dissections.

Here in Washington there is an excellent opportunity to study structural peculiarities in a race, the negro differing in many interesting respects from the Caucasian.

All students of ethnology recognize readily such obtrusive structural peculiarities as the color of the skin, the character of the hair, and the physiognomy; they also know, in connection with the latter factor, how craniology has been invoked to discriminate between races.

But cranial as well as other measurements of the body show considerable variations in the relative proportions of parts within. the same race, a fact which has led many to think that ethnologists have made too much of such measurements-have often given them undeserved prominence and applied them too frequently to the exclusion of other elements.

Cranial capacity, for instance, is not indicative of race in individuals; it is only of value as an induction based on an examination of large numbers of skulls; and even here it is only important when taken in connection with other features. To say that a skull belongs to a high race instead of a low one, for

*A discussion held before the Anthropological Society of Washington, January 7, 1896

instance, because it is megacephalic is entirely misleading; but to say that a high race will contain a larger percentage of megacephalic skulls than a low one is not only true, but helpful to the ethnologist. Indices, too, deal with the more conspicuous of racial structural peculiarities, while I wish to speak briefly of some of the less noticeable features.

As bearing in an interesting and instructive manner upon the question of racial anatomical peculiarities, a study of the present evolution of man is important.

Man apparently is undergoing at present a comparatively rapid development, almost as rapid, it has been observed, as was that of the horse from eocene times.

In this evolution of the races or subspecies of man, sexual selection has been a potent factor in producing the more glaring anatomical peculiarities, such as the color of the skin, the amount and character of the hair and its distribution over the body; but also use and disuse account for many of the less obtrusive ones. This latter statement brings us, no doubt, to questions at issue between Weismann and Spencer as to the transmission of acquired characters.

Some of the regions in which evolution may be said to be now going on are as follows: the skull, in which the face is decreasing in size, with early closure of sutures, while the cranium is increasing in size, with late closure of sutures.

The canine teeth have comparatively recently been reduced in size and the third molar teeth are tending to disappear.

The assumption of the upright posture has led and is still leading to an interesting series of correlated changes in the thorax, pelvis, and lumbar vertebra.

This posture has shifted the weight of the abdominal viscera from the thorax to the pelvis, and we find in consonance with this fact the eighth, ninth, and tenth ribs are reduced in size, the twelfth rib tends to disappear, and also the last lumbar vertebra tends to fuse with the sacrum, thus tilting up still farther the pelvis.

In reference to this subject, Professor Osborn has suggested that it would be interesting to note the condition of the ribs in some of the large-bellied tribes of the Africans. Rosenberg predicts that the man of the remote future will probably have but twenty-three free vertebra.

The curvatures of the spinal column are tending to increase. The female pelvis, in correlation with the augmenting cranium, is increasing in size, and thus diverging more and more from the male type.

The bones of the big toe, through use, are tending to increase in size, while those of the little toe, through disuse, are tending to decrease, with reduction of the number of phalanges by ankylosis.

In the study of these and other portions of the body that may be considered as still undergoing an evolution, it is important to note in the different races the degrees of divergence presented from the ordinary normal type and the percentage of relapse into more primitive conditions.

As the muscular system offers a degree of plasticity not found in the harder tissues, I am strongly inclined to think that the study of its variations must be fraught with instruction and interest.

But in the study of these variations a sharp distinction must be made between those that are atavistic (levator claviculæ, dorso-epitrochlearis, etc.) and those that are prophetic (e. g., occasional appearance of double abductor pollicis; the occasional absence of palmaris longus); also, in the study of all variations, whether muscular or otherwise, due care must be exercised in eliminating fortuitous cases-that is to say, sports or monstrosities such as supernumerary digits and incisors.

In this study of atavistic structures percentages of relapse may throw important light on racial structural peculiarities.

Muscular racial variations are most instructively investigated in those organs that are distinctively human, as the hand and foot.

As man descended from arboreal, "quadrumanous" animals, his assumption of the upright posture led to specialization in two different directions-the thoracic extremity for prehension and the pelvic one for locomotion.

On the one hand man's thoracic extremity (especially his hand), being used for vastly more diverse and complicated purposes than that of his simian ancestors, has undergone greater specialization; for instance, the extensor secundi internodii pollicis is completely separated from the extensor indicis; the flexor longus pollicis is detached from the flexor profundus degitorum; also the extensor minimi digiti has withdrawn its ad