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AMERICA
forlorn conditions and refined art products. Art in clay was far from universal in the two Americas. The Eskimo on Bering Sea had learned to model shallow bowls for lamps. No pottery existed in Athapascan boundaries. Algonkin-Iroquois tribes made creditable ware in Southeastern Canada and eastern United States. Muskhogean tribes were potters, but Siouan tribes, as a rule, in all the Mississippi drainage were not. In their area, however, dwelt clay-working tribes, and the Mandans had the art. Moreover, the mound-builders in the eastern half of this vast plain, being sedentary, were excellent potters. In the Muskhogee province the tribes were more settled, making clay vessels possible. On the Pacific side of the continent not one of the forty linguistic families made pottery. The only workers in clay west of the Rockies and north of the Pueblo country belonged to the Shoshonean family in the interior basin. The study of Indian textiles includes an account of their fibres, tools, processes, products, ornaments, and uses. Their fibres were either animal or vegetable; animal Industries fi^res were hair, fur on the skin, feathers, hide, sinew, and intestines ; vegetable fibres were stalks of small trees, brush, straw, cotton, bast, bark, leaves, and seed vessels in great variety as one passes from the north southward through all the culture provinces. The products of the textile industry in America were bark cloth, wattling for walls, fences and weirs, paper, basketry, matting, loom products, needle or point work, net-work, lace-work, and embroidery. In the manufacture of these the substances were reduced to the form of slender filaments, shreds, rods, splints, yarn, twine, and sennit or braid. All textile work was done by hand; the only devices known were the bark-peeler, the shredder, the flint-knife, the spindle, the rope-twister, the bodkin, the warp-beam, and the most primitive harness. The processes involved were gathering the raw material, shredding, splitting, gouging, wrapping, twining, spinning, and braiding. Twining and spinning were done with the fingers of both hands, with the palm on the thigh, with the spindle, and with the twister. Ornamentation was in form, colour, technical processes, and dyes. The uses to which the textiles were put were for clothing, furniture for the house, utensils for a thousand industries, fine arts, social functions, and worship. In order to comprehend the more intricate processes of the higher peoples it is necessary to examine the textile industry in all of the culture areas. It is essentially woman’s work. The Eskimo woman did not weave, but was expert in sewing and embroidering with sinew thread by means of a bodkin. The Dene peoples used strips of hide for snowshoes and game-bags, sewed their deerskin clothing with sinew thread, and embroidered in split quill. Their basketry, both in Canada and in Arizona, was coiled work. The northern Algonkin and Iroquoian tribes practised similar arts, and in the Atlantic States wove robes of animal and bird skins by cutting the latter into long strips, winding these strips on twine of hemp, and weaving them by the same processes employed in their wicker basketry. Textile work in the Sioux province was chiefly the making of skin garments with sinew thread, but in the Gulf States the existence of excellent cane and grasses gave opportunity for several varieties of weaving. On the Pacific coast of America the efflorescence of basketry in every form of technic was known. This art reached down to the borders of Mexico. Loom-weaving in its simplest form began with the Chilkats of Alaska, who hung the warp over a long pole, and wrought mythological figures into their gorgeous blankets by a process resembling tapestry work. The forming of bird skins, rabbit skins, and feathers into robes, and all basketry stitches, existed from Vancouver Island to Central America. In northern
[anthropology
Mexico net-work, rude lace-work in twine, are followed farther south, where finer material existed, by figured weaving of most intricate type and pattern; warps were crossed and wrapped, wefts were omitted, and texture changed, so as to produce marvellous effects upon the surface. This composite art reached its climax in Peru, the llama wool affording the finest staple on the whole hemisphere. Textile work in other parts of South America did not differ from that of the Southern States of the Union. The addition of brilliant ornamentation in shell, teeth, feathers, wings of insects, and dyed fibres completed the round of the textile art. A peculiar type of coiled basketry is found at the Strait of Magellan, but the motives are not American. Since most American tribes lived upon flesh, the activities of life were associated with the animal world. These activities were not confined to the land, but had Zootecbn to do also with those littoral meadows where invertebrate and vertebrate marine animals fed in unlimited numbers. An account of savage life, therefore, includes the knowledge of the animal life of America and its distribution, regarding the continent, not only as a whole, but in those natural history provinces and migrations which governed and characterized the activities of the peoples. This study would include industries connected with capture, those that worked up into products the results of capture, the social organizations and labours which were involved in pursuit of animals, the language, skill, inventions, and knowledge resulting therefrom, and, finally, the religious conception united with the animal world, which has been named zootheism. In the capture of animals would be involved the pedagogic influence of animal life; the engineering embraced in taking them in large numbers; the cunning and strategy necessary to hunters so poorly armed giving rise to disguises and lures of many kinds. Capture begins among the lower tribes with the hand, without devices, developing knack and skill in seizing, pursuing, climbing, swimming, and maiming without weapons; and proceeds to gathering with devices that take the place of the hand in dipping, digging, hooking, and grasping ; weapons for striking, whether clubs, missiles, or projectiles; edged weapons of capture, which were rare in America; piercing devices for capture, in lances, barbed spears, harpoons, and arrows ; traps for enclosing, arresting, and killing, such as pens, cages, pits, pen-falls, nets, hooks, nooses, clutches, adhesives, deadfalls, impalers, knife traps, and poisons; animals consciously and unconsciously aiding in capture; fire in the form of torches, beacons, burning out and smoking out; poisons and asphyxiators; the accessories to hunting, including such changes in food, dress, shelter, travelling, packing, mechanical tools, and intellectual apparatus as demanded by these arts. Finally, in this connexion, the first steps in domestication, beginning with the improvement of natural corrals or spawning grounds, and hunting with trained dogs and animals. Zootechnic products include food, clothing, ornaments, habitations, weapons, industrial tools, textiles, money, &c. In sociology the dependence of the American tribes upon the animal world becomes most apparent. A great majority of all the family names in America were from animal totems. The division of labour among the sexes was based on zootechny. Labour organizations for hunting; communal hunt, and migrations had to do with the animal world. In the duel between the hunter and the beast-mind the intellectual powers of perception, memory, reason, and will were developed ; experience and knowledge by experience were enlarged, language and the graphic arts were fostered, the inventive faculty was evoked and developed, and primitive science was fostered in the unfolding of numbers,
