RESULTS OF PRIMITIVE METHODS Handles held by grooves and holes cut into the stones. Handies bound on by strings. Handles grown on implements. Handles held by wedges. Handles by gum and gluing. Swelling of wedges to crack stones. Arrow, spear, lance, dagger, and flaker are hafted. The weight to shaft produces the digging stick. Strings made into nets. The house, tent, bedding, basket. Boats of hollow logs, of bark, of skin. Pots, pans. The classification here submitted is believed to cover the most primitive period of man as a tool-maker throughout the age of stone in all countries. Articles which in their natural state may be employed as tools do not appear to have been properly considered in regard to the influence they would have in governing the shape of primitive implements, nor do the physical actions of nature in adding to the tool-supply appear to have been studied in investigating the development of the implements of prehistoric man. Animals, the stones from water-courses, the minerals formed on the ledges of hills, shell from the seashores, and canes and other vegetal growths, all supplied the most primitive races with implements. Ivory, horn, bone, skin, water-worn pebbles, spalls broken from larger stones by frost or heat (with their sharp points or edges), shells, wood shaped by fire or decay, even the sand beds, cocoanuts, gourds, and vines furnished natural implements in almost endless variety. The earliest trace of man acquaints us with him not only as a tool-user, but as a tool-maker, who shaped stones by chipping them, who scraped bone, ivory, and horn into forms to suit his convenience, even to the extent of perforating and carving them in imitation of men and beasts and fishes; he added to the nat ural supply of his particular neighborhood; he imitated the natural results of stone rubbing against stone in running streams and knew how a blow from a stone would affect other stones by shattering into spalls similar to those which occasionally would be derived from the effects of frost or fire. Many travelers have referred to the implements employed by primitive races living in the lowest stages of savagery, and almost without exception it is found that the rudest people in mechanical development have made the best uses of the natural productions of their particular locality. Among these are found stones to hurl, hammers with which to strike, deer-horn and fish bone piercers, the spurs of birds and splinters of stone or bone for arrowheads where bows are used, and thorns and splinters for pins and needles; split canes, shells, and spalls of stone furnished knives; the limbs of trees supplied clubs and levers, and shark teeth and shells were used as saws and razors; sand and coral were the grinding stones, and smooth pebbles were used as polishers; turtle-shells, shellfish, and cocoanuts provided drinking vessels, and even shields; bladders and gourds supplied receptacles, and skins of animals or bundles of reeds furnished the means of crossing deep streams; vines, entrails, and the tendons of animals were used as cords for different purposes; the skins of beasts and of birds answered where needed as clothing; pigments were employed for coloring, and feathers and shells for ornamentation. These were some of the things employed by man of the earliest stone age. This classification is not supposed to be perfect, but is believed to cover stone-age conditions in material and process and is offered for criticism, which cannot fail to aid the systematic study of the technology of archeology, which should agree as to the development of tools in Europe, in America, or elsewhere. No matter what argument is advanced as to the mechanical development of the people of the earliest periods, it cannot be successfully denied that those who made the familiar tools and carvings of the caves and who cut and ground the bone and ivory ornaments and made the whistles and other objects from bone and antler, and whom it is now acknowledged made and burned pottery (as the so-called paleolithic man of Europe did, though by some this was long denied), they were in mechanical skill or culture development practically the same man as he of the polished-stone period, for he had necessarily to perform similar work. It will not do to claim that American archeologists because of their want of familiarity with European conditions are incompetent to judge of the accuracy of the paleolithic theory. There are few museums not possessing types of the European paleoliths, to say nothing of the American chipped stones called paleoliths and admitted to represent similar conditions. The eminent ethnologist, Major Powell, has well expressed the fact that "the mind of man is everywhere the same; the differences of its products are evidences of differences of growth or different conditions of environment." The danger to be apprehended from the paleolithic theory is well evidenced by the flints of Cissbury, in England, and Spiennes, in Belgium, and even the cave-finds of Europe have been criticised by an eminent European archeologist, who has asserted that had they come from near the surface in England they would have been considered neolithic. If man of the Paleolithic period had taken the stone from which Neolithic man struck long thin flakes and broken it, he would of necessity have broken off such flakes, and just as certainly had Neolithic man tried to improve on the obsidian spearpoints of the Easter islander-implements than which none are more rude he would have ignominiously failed. He would further have found that even to imitate the Easter island implement he would have to break all the spalls from one side of the stone or destroy the specimen because of its peculiar fracture. Was Paleolithic man never in a position where he need break the indurated clays or metamorphic rocks? If he was, he surely could chip but very few, if any, of them. To summarize, it may be said that primitive life has been everywhere similar and that primitive implements are alike, as are the needs of savage people. This is emphasized in the known similarity in implements the world over. Wherever we find traces of man, there we find his tools; we find the natural supply has been employed and that they were produced by blow or pressure from stone, vegetal products, and animal remains. DR GEORGE A. DORSEY, who has been an instructor at the Peabody Museum during the last five years, has accepted a call to the Field Columbian Museum of Chicago, to take the position of assistant curator in the department of anthropology. He will be in full charge of physical anthropology at that institution. Mr Frank Russell, of the graduate school of Harvard, has been appointed assistant in anthropology to take Dr Dorsey's place as instructor in Anthropology for next year.-Harvard Crimson. THE UTE BEAR DANCE VERNER Z. REED In March, 1893, I attended and participated in the annual Bear dance of the Ute Indians, held on this occasion by the Southern Ute tribe on their reservation in Colorado. Owing to an intimate personal friendship with the war chief and several other prominent members of the tribe, I was enabled, by dint of much patience and perseverance, to meet with some success in making a study of the dance. I do not believe that any white person has studied it before, and while it is quite probable that all the mysteries of the dance were not explained to me, I believe that the knowledge gained will be of interest to students of Indian life. So far as I could learn, there is no tradition antedating the dance itself on which the ceremonies are founded, and I believe the Bear dance to be one of the oldest of all the Ute ceremonies. Traditions are mingled with it, are the life of it, but the Indians believe the dance to be as old as the traditions themselves. In all the picturesque West there is probably nothing more picturesque than the sacred Bear dance of the Ute. The one I attended was held in the valley of the Rio de los Pinos, a beautiful little tributary valley of the great San Juan, with the mighty panorama of the towering La Plata mountains always in view. Groups of tents were scattered over a distance of a mile or more. Far away over the mesas could be seen the caravans, groups and individual Indians, coming to the camp to participate in the dance. An inclosure of evergreen boughs was erected near some tall cottonwood trees, and everywhere were Indians dressed in their best and on their best behavior, gathered together from the ends of the reservation for the purpose of assisting in the cere monies. Although their reservations are being encroached on by the settlements of the whites, the Ute Indians have scarcely been touched by civilizing influences, and they adhere to the traditions and beliefs of their fathers in the days before they were hemmed in by Anglo-Saxon boundary lines of progress. To them Nature is the all-providing mother, and their ceremonies are founded on the evidences of nature as they see them. A vivid imagination has often crowned or distorted nature, but through all their rites there runs an adoration of natural phenomena. They have seen the eagle in his eyries preying on and mastering all other birds, and they regard the eagle as being king and chief of the feathered kind. They have seen the mountain lion assert his supremacy over all other animals, and to them he is king of beasts. They have, in their way, traced the laws of nature in either direction to birth or death, and there they leave fact and enter the realm of superstition, as many wiser nations have done. The Utes believe that their primal ancestors were bears; after these came a race of Indians, who, on dying, were changed to bears, and as bears they roamed in the forests and mountains until they died, when they went to the future land and lived with the shades, preserving the forms of bears, but having human wisdom and participating with the Indians in the pleasures of immortality. It is believed that this transmigration ceased long ago, but the bears of the present are believed to be descendants of the Ute bears of old, and are therefore related to the Indians. Bear worship, in one form or another, tinges many of their ceremonies. They regard the bear as the wisest of animals and the bravest of all except the mountain lion. They believe that bears possess wonderful magic power; that they can convey intelligence over long distances by means of po-o-kan-te, or magic. They believe that the bears are fully cognizant of the relationship existing between themselves and the Utes, and their ceremony of the Bear dance, being a form of animal worship, assists in strengthening this friendship. As the Utes consider that they are a higher order of beings than the bears, one of the purposes of the dance is to assist the bears to recover from hibernation, to find food, to choose mates, and to cast the film of blindness from their eyes. Some of the other motives of the ceremonies are to charm the dancers from danger of death from bears, to enable the Indians to send messages to their dead friends who dwell in the land of immortality, and one or two minor ceremonies are performed usually for the purpose of healing certain forms of sickness. The Bear dance is always held in the month of March, that being the time when the bears recover from hibernation. In former times the dance was more exactingly observed than it |