Ethnological Interest Research Articles

크리에이티브 디렉터의 변화에 따른 구찌 디자인의 조형성과 미적 특성

This study aimed to examine the formativeness and aesthetic characteristics of the Gucci Collections by the three creative directors. A literature review on brand history and design philosophy of the creative directors and a comparative analysis on formativeness on Gucci collection from 1995FW to 2019FW were done. Based thereon, the present study analyzed aesthetic characteristics such as simplicity, sensuality, historical exoticism, and naturalness. Simplicity is limited to the collections by Ford, and sensuality is the only characteristic applied into all designers. Simplicity by Ford was shown in the simple forms, achromatic colors, and restrained patterns and decorations. Ford expressed erotic sensuality, Giannini emphasized restrained sensuality, and Michele represents sensuality mixing characteristics of both sexes. Exoticism and naturalness are expressed in collections by Giannini and Michele. Historical exoticism was expressed via interest in ethnology by borrowing patterns and embellishments of traditional ethnic costume in the collections by Giannini and by mixing a variety of periods and cultures in the collections by Michele. Naturalness was shown by Giannini as natural patterns by reinterpreting floras in various manners related to flora, a symbolic icon of Gucci. In addition, Michele, who was influenced by the hippie style, expressed the naturalness realized with patterns indicating eco-friendly motives and handcrafted embroidery. Findings of this study reveal that the three creative directors developed Gucci successfully by tuning their design identity to periodic demands based on the tradition of the brand while preserving the heritage of Gucci even during socio-cultural and administrative transitions.

A Harvard Physician’s Reports on an 1857 Visit to the Saamaka

Abstract In 1857, Harvard professor and anatomist Jeffries Wyman traveled to Suriname to collect specimens for his museum at Harvard (later the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, founded in 1866 and curated by Wyman). Though his main interest concerned amphibians, he had a secondary interest in ethnology and, apparently, a desire to demonstrate current theories of racial “degeneration” among the African-descended population, particularly the “Bush Negroes.” This research note presents a letter he wrote his sister from Suriname, excerpts from his field diary, and sketches he made while visiting the Saamaka and Saa Kiiki Ndyuka. Wyman’s brief account of his visit suggests that Saamakas’ attitudes toward outside visitors (whether scientists, missionaries, or government officials) remained remarkable stable, from the time of the 1762 peace treaty until the Suriname civil war of the 1980s.

Black Hawk in Translation: Indigenous Critique and Liberal Guilt in the 1847 Dutch Edition of <em>Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak</em>

Black Hawk in TranslationIndigenous Critique and Liberal Guilt in the 1847 Dutch Edition of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak Frank Kelderman (bio) In 1846 Rinse Posthumus, a Protestant country pastor in the north of the Netherlands, received from a friend a copy of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-shekia-kiak, the as-told-to autobiography of the Sauk military leader Black Hawk. First published in Cincinnati in 1833, the Life was a best seller in the United States, but it was unfamiliar to Posthumus, who lived in a small village near the North Sea in the province of Friesland (Frisia). Over the course of the year, he studied Back Hawk’s life story and began a translation of the text for Dutch readers, which he published in the city of Leeuwarden in 1847 as Levensgeschiedenis van Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kiakiak, of Zwarte Havik. If Black Hawk can be regarded as the author of his autobiography, this makes Posthumus’s text the first foreign translation of a book-length work of Native American literature.1 Posthumus’s edition did not cause much of a stir. Years later, the Dutch anticolonial writer Eduard Douwes Dekker mentioned the book as an “important” work (Multatuli 50), but no subsequent editions of the translation were published, nor has there been any commentary on the text by literary historians. Nevertheless, Levensgeschiedenis van Zwarte Havik sheds new light on the role of Indigenous writing in a transatlantic print culture in which the representation of American Indians generated popular entertainment, theories of government, and philosophies of universal history. In Britain, the circulation of American Indian literature came on the heels of a wealth of writings about Indigenous people in periodicals and newspapers, as well as “anthropological studies, works of racial science, and missionary narratives” (Flint 3). There was a continental European dimension to this story as well, and since the early nineteenth century the representation of Indianer held a prominent place especially in the German cultural imagination [End Page 58] (Bolz; Zantop; Penny; King). But as a growing number of studies has shown, the role of Indigenous people in what Jace Weaver terms “the Red Atlantic” was not merely to provide symbolic representations of Native presence: their writings, performances, diplomacy, and protests inflected the very currents of modern political and intellectual thought (Weaver; Flint; Lyons). Extending these transatlantic dialogues to a Frisian-Dutch print culture, Rinse Posthumus’s translation of the Life not only catered to a widespread ethnological interest in Native American culture in Europe but also brought Black Hawk’s critique of settler expansion into political debates about state power that had local and transnational implications. This essay is about what happened to Black Hawk’s story in translation. Annotated by a rural pastor in the province of Friesland, Levensgeschiedenis connects Black Hawk’s account of Indian removal in the American Midwest to a region that has been marginal to the history of cultural exchange in the Atlantic world. In what follows, I consider Rinse Posthumus’s role as translator and editor, tracing how his theological commentary builds on Enlightenment assumptions about race and linguistic difference even as it carries out a universalism that validates Indigenous cultural traditions. But I also argue that his editorial work amplifies a critical current in Black Hawk’s text about the relation between settler colonialism and the role of government, which intersected with nineteenth-century debates about political liberalism and immigration to North America. Posthumus witnessed the economic decline in the northern Netherlands in the 1840s, and his edition of the Life resonates with concerns about agricultural crises in Europe and the population movements of the mid-nineteenth century. By annotating Black Hawk’s account of Sauk traditions and Indigenous dispossession, Posthumus gives voice to his political commitment to liberalism during a time of economic depression and revolutionary energy in the Netherlands. Since these pressures gave rise to a peak in Dutch immigration to the American Midwest—including the very lands that were opened up for settlement after the Black Hawk War (1832)—his commentary in Levensgeschiedenis negotiates a politics of liberal guilt over the intertwined histories of European migration and Sauk...

Friedrich Ratzel, Lebensraum and the death motif

This intervention explores ‘death’ as an interpretive key both to Friedrich Ratzel's Lebensraum essay and his oeuvre more generally. Ratzel, I argue, was preoccupied with death in a number of ways, including a biogeographical concern with extinction, an ethnological interest in cannibalism and a fascination with the ruins of exterminated civilisations. Indeed, Ratzel grappled with the aesthetics of death itself in the later stages of his life. An appreciation of Ratzel as a thanatological thinker, I argue, opens the door to a recognition of his place not just at the inception of modern geopolitics but as an early thinker of biopolitics too.

Frank Hoff (1932–2013)

Frank Hoff (1932–2013) Cody Poulton Frank Hoff taught Japanese theatre at the University of Toronto from 1973 to 1996. I took both undergraduate and graduate courses from him, and I remain his student. He whetted my own interest in Japanese theatre, and I discovered that we shared a similar background in what used to be called Classics (now called Greek and Roman studies at my own university). Born in Los Angeles on 31 January 1932, Hoff graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern Califor¬nia in 1954 and made his first trip to Japan, from 1954 to 1956, as a lieutenant in the US Navy. He received an AM in classical philology from Harvard University in 1958, but as a result of his experiences in Japan switched to comparative literature, and he received his PhD, also from Harvard, in 1966. Frank taught at Princeton University (1965–1968), Sophia University (1968–1972), and Tokyo Women’s College (1972–1973) before joining the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. In Tokyo, he became a good friend of David Goodman’s. With Willi Flindt, Frank published “The Life Structure of Nō,” an introduction to Yokomichi Mario’s analysis of nō theatre “as a performance event, and not as a genre of literature,” in David’s seminal magazine Concerned Theatre Japan (Hoff and Flindt 1973: 212). Frank’s work anticipated the “performative turn” taken by scholars like Karen Brazell and Monica Bethe, but like Goodman he was equally interested in the ways in which Japanese theatre and culture of the 1960s were overturning Western ideological hegemonies and our own assumptions of what theatre was or should be. My own understanding of drama [End Page 606] had been largely text-based, but Frank’s lectures—which ranged from scripts for plays to the popular songs of Japan’s middle ages, newspaper clippings of police raids on the Victory Burlesque House in Toronto, rock concerts, Lou Reed, and Mick Jagger—were a heady and intoxicating brew. Frank also introduced me to the work of Richard Schechner, now considered the “father” of performance studies. Both Goodman and Schechner were featured in this journal’s “Founders of the Field” series last fall, so it is fitting that we honor Frank Hoff here, too, for his contribution to our understanding of a wide range of Japanese performing arts, from folk song to shamanistic dance, from classical theatre to the avant-garde (see Hoff 1976; 1977a; 1977b; 1981; 1982a; 1982b; 1992; in addition to other works discussed below). Click for larger view View full resolution Frank Hoff in 1988. (Photo: Courtesy of Christopher Yohmei Blasdel) A real intellectual trendsetter, Hoff was erudite, but an exceptionally good listener, sincerely interested in what he could learn from others; his tastes were discriminating but catholic. Having lived through much of the cultural ferment of the Japanese 1960s, he had both a keen understanding of the contemporary zeitgeist and a deep knowledge of the roots of Japanese culture. From his ongoing studies under Honda Yasuji at Waseda University in Tokyo, first as a Fulbright scholar (1961–1964), Frank learned the extent to which folk performance (minzoku geinō) has influenced the course of Japanese culture since earliest times. He drew a clear distinction between geinō and engeki, the latter being a more recent and restrictive term, closer to the Western notion of theatre. Writing in his introduction to a translation [End Page 607] of Honda’s essay on Yamabushi kagura and bangaku (both folk forms of ritual dance unique to Akita and Yamagata prefectures), Hoff states that “Honda’s scholarship has laid the groundwork for what I feel is a shift in theatrical values” (Hoff and Honda 1974: 192). Inspired by Honda’s research, Frank’s interest in ethnology paralleled the work of American scholars like Victor Turner and Richard Schechner. Yet the work of other Japanese theatre scholars like Omote Akira, Gunji Masakatsu, and Dōmoto Masaki, as well as practitioners like the nō actor Kanze Hisao, with whom he became friends in 1972 during seminars on Japanese theatre sponsored by Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret in Denmark and at the Biennale in Venice, had an equally...

The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island by Mac Griswold

Book Reviews 513 Mahican past contain “largely unsupported, if not invented, constructions” based on inappropriate comparisons with other Algonquian and Iroquoian societies; and he carefully picks apart one source after another in order to sift out what we can know of the Mahican with any degree of confidence (61). Even as Mahican history sharpens somewhat with their resettlement in Stockbridge, Starna reminds us that “Native life . . . is not easily reconstructed” there because there was little ethnological interest in people that whites regarded as objects of a civilizing mission(186). Readers of New York History will appreciate the care with which Starna reviews the literature on Mahican history and raises probing questions about the presumptions that have shaped the scholarly consensus. As Starna acknowledges at the outset, one of his aims with this project was to follow Francis Jennings’ advice to “open the field rather than to close it.” From Homeland to New Land fulfills that mission admirably. The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island. By Mac Griswold. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.480 pages, $28.00 Cloth. Reviewed by Ahmed Reid, Bronx Community College, CUNY The historiography of slavery in the Americas has seen many important contributions that have broadened our collective understanding of the nature and structure of slave plantation societies. The Manor, a well-researched book, adds to the ever growing list. Working almost exclusively from manuscript sources found in the United States, Barbados, Europe, and Africa, Griswold has written the history of this small northern plantation. In doing so, she reconstructs the lives of the owners, the enslaved Africans (who provided the labor needs from 1650 until 1827 when the state of New York outlawed slavery), and the local Manhasset Indians (many of whom worked alongside slaves to provide labor on the plantation). In many ways, slavery in New York City (and throughout the Americas) was linked to the emerging transatlantic trading networks of the 514 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A quick glance at the city’s founding shows the centrality of the slave trade, and the priority given to it by the Dutch and the Dutch West India Company. It is within this framework of trade and the globalizing tendencies of transatlantic commerce that Griswold has placed The Manor. At the heart of this narrative are the Sylvester brothers (Nathaniel and Constant), who, like thousands of white Europeans, traveled to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in search of fortune. In 1642, Constant, the elder brother purchased a slave plantation in Barbados. Soon after, they bought Long Island manor, which would emerge as an important link in the Barbados plantation’s supply chain. In this way, the plantation became a part of a larger global network that encompassed the transshipment of over 12 million Africans to the Americas, and in turn, the shipping of sugar and rum to the mainland colonies and Europe. The manor’s location proved ideal. Situated just a few miles south of Newport, Rhode Island, with its bustling trade with the British Caribbean, the Sylvester’s turned the manor into a provisioning plantation, supplying meat, horses, and wooden staves (used to make barrels to transport muscavado sugar, rum and molasses) to the British West Indies. In return, the manor would import sugar and rum for domestic consumption. In many ways, the fact that the manor was a provisioning plantation distinguished it from the typical slave plantations in the southern colonies and Caribbean where monoculture formed the basis of economic activity. The manor was smaller in size, more diversified, and its crop cycle relatively shorter. Another distinguishing feature was the number of enslaved peoples who worked on the plantation. In Nathaniel Sylvester’s will of 1680, the labor force comprised twenty-four slaves, thirteen of whom were children. Crucially, there was no separated space between master and slave; thus, enslaved peoples had little ability to construct alternative lifestyles. But, what was the level and nature of exploitation on the manor? Were the enslaved treated any differently from their southern counterparts? These are questions that would have afforded the reader an important insight into the true nature of plantation slavery, regardless of spatial...

"Abraços de mono": elos perdidos e encontros intersubjetivos em etnografia com primatólogos no Brasil

A partir de pesquisa etnográfica junto a um grupo de primatólogos atuando em um fragmento da Mata Atlântica mineira, proponho tratar de algumas questões caras à antropologia da ciência, em especial daquela que da perspectiva etnológica se interessa pelas relações entre humanos e não humanos e pelas dinâmicas cosmológicas de atuação deste coletivo. Neste trabalho dedico-me à analise das formas de construção da imagem e agenciamento dos primatas estudados [conhecidos como "muriquis" ou "mono-carvoeiros"] que permeiam o discurso-cultura dos pesquisadores. Procura-se apresentar este coletivo de humanos e não humanos mapeando suas relações e variações dispostas na circulação de imagens, comportamentos e performances transespecíficas.

Romantic Federalism: Atlantic Republican Literature between Cosmopolitanism and Confederation

AbstractThe age of democratic revolution in the Atlantic world (1776–1815) was marked by writing whose politics have been described as both patriotic and universalist. Far from reflecting a simple contradiction in revolutionary republicanism, these two strains reflect the simultaneous development of federalist and cosmopolitan discourses in the late Enlightenment and early Romanticism. This essay argues that we need a paradoxical conception of ‘Romantic federalism’ to account for transatlantic republican discourse in this period. Romantic federalism, in this essay’s account, facilitated both an ethnological interest in human diversity and a universalist understanding of popular sovereignty. The essay first takes as its case studies an anonymous visionary pamphlet, entitledThe Golden Age; Constantin‐François Volney’s best‐known work,The Ruins; and the literary legacy of Anacharsis Cloots, the ‘Orator of the Human Race’. The essay concludes with a review of recent literary studies of both federalism and nationalism, and suggests ways that overemphasis on the nation form has led to neglect not only of republicanism but also of imperialism.

Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson (review)

Reviewed by: Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson Suzanne Zeller (bio) Phil Jenkins. Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson. McClelland and Stewart. xii, 356. $34.99 What constitutes a person’s memoirs? According to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the plural form denotes ‘an autobiography or a written account of one’s memory of certain events or people.’ In this interesting volume on the life of the pioneering Canadian geologist and ethnologist George Mercer Dawson (1849–1901), the award-winning popular writer Phil Jenkins explains that what began as a biography eventually (d)evolved instead into what he also describes as Dawson’s ‘ghost-written’ autobiography. Jenkins means that, after encountering the truly massive collection of Dawson’s personal and family papers in the McGill University archives, he simply ‘laid out’ Dawson’s many letters ‘in a narrative line forty-five years long.’ ‘In creating a coherent narrative,’ however, ‘parts of some letters were moved to the times they described,’ with others rearranged ‘to ensure a narrative flow.’ ‘Every fact in this memoir is Dawson’s fact,’ Jenkins assures us, ‘as is every description of his travels.’ While Jenkins estimates that ‘close to ninety-five percent of the book is written in his [Dawson’s] own words,’ he [Jenkins] ‘tidied up’ the overall work ‘to best tell the story of a man who led a heroic life, and who deserves to have his story on as many bookshelves as possible.’ Jenkins is certainly right in his appraisal of Dawson’s importance in Canadian history as well as the spellbinding nature of his influential professional career. The son of the Nova Scotian geologist Sir John William Dawson (1820–99), principal of Montreal’s McGill College through most of the latter half of the nineteenth century, George was born into Canada’s scientific elite, educated at London’s prestigious Royal School of Mines, and then appointed to undertake the Geological Survey of Canada’s first forays after Confederation westward into British Columbia and northward into the Yukon during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. His accomplishments appear all the more remarkable in light of severe physical challenges that resulted from a childhood bout with tuberculosis of the spine. As a leader among the second generation of professional Canadian geologists, Dawson contributed not only to the geological and mineralogical mapping of enormous territories, but also to major theoretical issues confronting the science of the day, including the roles of both evolution and glaciation in shaping the country’s landforms and their denizens. His own interest in ethnology and anthropology also [End Page 322] helped to shape government policy toward British Columbia’s Native peoples, as well as initiating the museum collections of native artifacts that, for better or worse, sought to preserve these items for posterity. For all these reasons, Jenkins’s timely book makes fascinating reading, and it is no surprise that he found himself captivated by Dawson’s vivid scientific, literary, and artistic legacy. But there is no attempt in Jenkins’s approach to set any of Dawson’s many achievements into any kind of larger context. How, for example, are uninitiated readers to understand his unofficial observations about his Native guides? More poignantly, while we learn in an entire chapter about the devastating impact of the unrequited love of Dawson’s life, the lack of context does little to explicate what exactly happened, and what we might be able to learn about Victorian society from the ways in which both his family and others responded to his tragic disability. In the end, it is even unclear whether this animated reprinting of Dawson’s own letters is at all sufficient to convey the enormous significance of Dawson’s professional accomplishments. For historians, who ought long ago to have risen to the considerable challenge of providing a definitive biography of Dawson, this work raises still more fundamental questions. Without a single citation or even a single quotation mark throughout this book, how can we tell which 5% of the words do not belong to Dawson or, for that matter, when (and where, and for whom) he wrote the remaining 95%? In an irony that Jenkins himself recognizes, Dawson...

Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism

Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism

Some Indonesian Epistolary Conventions

It has long been claimed that the facilitation of intercultural communication is one of the more valuable services applied anthropology can offer the layman. Yet in the course of their researches ethnographers often encounter—and put to use—customs, conventions, and rules of etiquette pertaining to communication, but neglect to publish descriptions of them because of their apparent triviality or lack of broader ethnological interest. As a result others are denied a valuable source of information that might enable them to avoid giving offense or otherwise improve communication across cultural boundaries. As an example of the kind of information that might be useful to the layman, I offer the following brief (and somewhat tentative) description of some nonobvious conventions pertaining to the writing of letters in Indonesia. The data presented here were collected from among several welleducated university students in Yogyakarta, Central Java. The informants represented Javanese, Sundanese (West Java), Madur...

The Making of the First Ancient Monuments Act, 1882, and Its Administration Under General Pitt-Rivers

The first Ancient Monuments Act was the first measure to protect part of the built and artistic heritage of the United Kingdom. Gives a full account, from the documentary sources, of the Act's genesis, as a private member's Bill of the Liberal MP Sir John Lubbock, baron Avebury, and its administration by General A.H.L. Fox-Pitt-Rivers, first Inspector of Ancient Monuments. Discusses Lubbock's and Fox-Pitt-Rivers's concern with prehistoric monuments of ethnological interest, and their reluctance to involve themselves in the matters of taste that arose in the protection of more recent buildings, especially ecclesiastical and medieval structures. Catalogues the sites involved in the 1882 act, with a summary of its consequences in each case. -- AATA

The Hong Kong Sea-shore — an Environment in Crisis

Hong Kong comprises an area of some 400 square miles (1,036 km2) and a population of 4.5 million people largely living in an urban and city complex centred around a magnificent natural harbour. Such an urbanized community, hemmed in by mountains, is separate from the hitherto rural remainder of Hong Kong.The geographical position of Hong Kong, lying as it does on the borders of the temperate and tropical zoogeographic regions, when correlated with a local diversity of geomorphological and hydrological eccentricities, creates a fascinating assemblage of littoral biotic communities within a small area. The expanding urban area, however, resulting from a population growth that is confidently expected to reach 5.5–6.5 millions by 1991, is encroaching into the rural and coastal areas.The demand for low-lying flat land has resulted in official and unofficial reclamations, initially of soft shores which are of significant archaeological and ethnological interest. The same shores constitute Hong Kong's countryside, but people bathe in waters that are grossly polluted by human and agricultural effluents, so that coliform bacterial counts in excess of 106 per 100 ml have been recorded. Squatter huts still dot Hong Kong's coastline despite massive rehousing projects, and shellfish are widely collected. Moreover, oysters are cultivated and not cleansed prior to resale.No coastal parks, conservation areas, reserves, or even a coastal code, actually exists. The sea-shore is not used as an ‘open-air laboratory’, nor as an educational tool except at the tertiary level.In such a community the sea-shore demands special attention, and in a world that is approaching urbanization as a way of life, Hong Kong, as a microcosm of south-east Asia, offers a case in point and a lesson in survival.

Indian piscicidal plants

Fish catching with the aid of plants is an ancient practice. Plants have been used in various parts of the world by primitive people from times immemorial for poisoning or stupefying fish. The practice is one of great biological and ethnological interest and has attracted the attention of both travelers and scientists. In recent times, however, this method of catching fish has been condemned and in some countries even declared illegal. All parts of the plant have been used; but in most cases a certain part only, such as the bark or root in which the toxic principle is located, is utilized. The usual method is to mash the plant or a plant part between stones, and throw it into a pool or netted-off section of a stream. Some workers have suggested from their studies of reactions of fish to the poisons that they affect the respiratory organs (27, 28). Rotenone and allied substances have been reported to exert their action in or via the gills. It appears that such substances enter the blood stream of fish via the gills and then spread to vital organs, the central nervous system, where they are reported to inhibit the respiratory reactions in mitochondria (27). The saponins, on the other hand, have been reported to act chiefly by lowering the surface tensions between water and the gills, thus preventing the uptake of oxygen by the fish and leading to slow death by oxygen deprivation. Fish and other "cold-blooded" animals are said to be particularly sensitive to the toxic effects of saponins (19). At present there seems to be no evidence to prove that the fish obtained by the use of poisonous plants are in any way rendered unwholesome as an article of food, although a tendency to putrefy sooner has been reported.

A Geography of Pokeweed

The plants we call weeds stand apart from their truly wild and truly tame fellows because of their special ability to establish themselves in artificial habitats. In spite of indifference or active repression by man, they have been able to thrive and multiply with the advance of civilization. By the very fact of their existence such plants suggest problems of special botanical and ethnological interest. There is the problem of the peculiar characteristics which have allowed the weeds to exploit disturbed places. There are also the questions of how the ancestors of modern weeds fitted into the ancient natural plant associations of pre-human times, how much these plants have evolved, and how far they have migrated since they first allied themselves with man. General answers to such questions will require understanding of the stories of many individual species. Since only fragments of direct historical evidence on most weed species can be found in published records or herbarium collections, their stories must be reconstructed largely from indirect evidence. One of the most powerful lines of indirect evidence may be found in geographic distributions. The present geographic patterns of the weeds, like those of any phenomena irregularly distributed over the earth's surface, offer strong though sometimes complex and cryptic clues to their past stories. This paper represents an attempt to describe and understand the distribution patterns of a single species, Phytolacca amnericana L. (P. decandra L.; includes P. rigida Small), commonly called pokeweed or simply poke. Poke is in some ways an especially attractive subject for such a case study. The species is relatively clear-cut taxonomically and is the sole representative of its genus through almost its entire range. Thus a wealth of previous records can be used in studying its distribution, with slight danger of accepting mistaken identifications. The gross range is considered first, followed by examination of the microdistribution. Finally, an effort is made to reconstruct some of the story of how poke became a successful weed.

Prof. C. G. Seligman, F.R.S

BY the death of Prof. C. G. Seligman, emeritus professor of ethnology in the University of London, which took place at Oxford on September 19, anthropological studies in Great Britain have lost the support and inspiration of one who had been an outstanding personality as investigator in the field and as teacher for the greater part of the present century. As is shown by the record of his earlier years, he might well have attained eminence in more than one of the medical and kindred branches of scientific study; but his association with the late Dr. A. C. Haddon on the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1897 inspired him with an interest in ethnology which ultimately led him to make the study of early man and the life of primitive peoples from every side and in the broadest sense the major object of his life work. Yet final judgment upon his standing in the world of science cannot fail to take into account that his acute and versatile mind was quick to seize upon the essentials of any new or suggestive lines of investigation in other branches of study, which might bear upon his own subject, such as, for example, recent developments in psychology and the interpretation of dreams, not only turning it to his own purpose, but more often than not also making some original constructive contribution of his own to its advancement.

Notes on Prehistoric Mounds in the Caucasus and Turkestan

On the occasion of a journey by railway across the Caucasus and into Western Turkestan in March, 1919, I found the opportunity of making a few notes upon objects of archaeological and ethnological interest in these areas. Unfortunately it was impossible to obtain any very detailed information as to mounds and other sites; and these notes are, in consequence, hardly more than a record of things observed en route. I was not able to obtain specimens of pottery from any of the mounds here referred to.The area dealt with is the ground in the Caucasus covered by the main railway line from Batum to Baku, and in Turkestan by the plains at the foothills of the Balkhan and Kopet Dagh ranges over which the Central Asiatic railway runs eastwards from Krasnovodsk, its Caspian terminus.

The Ethnological Museum at Leyden

IT is from twenty-five to thirty years ago that the interest in ethnology as a science was awakened. Ethnological objects are no longer considered by scientific men as mere curiosities; collections of them have ceased to be shops of foreign bric-a-brac. In America and in Europe, museums have arisen, variable in size and importance it is true, but all with the same object in view, viz. the study of man from his handiwork as illustrative of his mental development in various directions, in time as well as in space.

Scientific Serials

American Journal of Science, March.—On the absolute wavelength of light, by Louis Bell. The experiments here described were undertaken with a view to check the results obtained by C. S. Pierce for Prof. Rowland's great map of the solar spectrum, and to furnish a value of the absolute wave-length as nearly as possible commensurate in accuracy with the micrometrical observations. For the wave-length of D, at 2O° C. and 720 mm. pressure, Mr. Bell obtains 5896.08, or in vacuo 5897.71, as compared with 5896.22, Rowland's micrometer measure from Pierce's preliminary result, and 5895.89, Thalèn's correction of Ångström, both in air at ordinary temperature and 760 mm. pressure. But neither of these was corrected for errors in the gratings; hence, obviously, the cause of the discrepancy.—On the relative wavelength of the lines of the solar spectrum, by Prof. Henry A. Rowland. This measurement of the relative wave-lengths of the spectrum and its reduction to absolute wave-lengths by some modern determination has been undertaken in connexion with the photographic map of the solar spectrum on which the author has been engaged for several years, and which is now finished from the extreme ultra-violet wave-length 3200 down to wavelength 5790. Appended are tables of coincidences and of wave-lengths of standard lines.—The norites of the “Cortlandt series” on the Hudson River, near Peakskill, New York (continued), by G. H. Williams. Here are studied the mica norites, the augite norite (hyperite), pyroxenite, and the iron ore and emery in the Cortlandt norite. Owing to incipient alteration, easily visible under the microscope, the West-Chester County emery appears to be of less commercial value than that of Asia Minor.—Natural solutions of cinnabar, gold, and associated sulphides, by George F. Becker. In the course of investigations on the geology of the quicksilver deposits of the Pacific slope, the author has made some studies, here detailed, on the question of the state of combination in which quicksilver is dissolved in natural waters. The solubility of zincblende, pyrite (marcasite), copper sulphides, gold, and other associates of cinnabar, is incidentally examined, the quantitative analysis involved in the process being made by Dr. W. H. Melville.—Fluviatile swamps of New England, by N. S. Shaler. In examining the freshwater swamps of this region, the author has carefully studied the geographical distribution of those formed along the banks of rivers. Although the inquiry is mainly limited to the post-glacial changes in the valleys trending northwards, much light is incidentally thrown on the pre-glacial altitude of the continent. It is made evident that these valleys could not have been excavated by streams of their present slope; hence the inference that the descent of the northward flowing rivers must have been more rapid in pre-glacial times than at present; in other words, this part of the continent was at that time relatively less elevated in its northern parts than it is at present.—On the Mazapil meteoric-iron which fell on November 27, 1885, by William Earl Hidden.—On observations of the eclipse of August 18, 1887, in connexion with the electric telegraph, by Prof. David P. Todd. Referring to his remarks in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 1881, p. 359, the author points out how the proposed method of telegraphic transmission of important observations might be adopted during the eclipse of August 18 next.—On two new meteorites from Carroll County, Kentucky, and Catorze, Mexico, by George F. Kunz. The Kentucky iron has some ethnological interest in connexion with the ornaments of meteoric iron occurring in the mounds of the Little Miami Valley, Ohio, all apparently belonging to one and the same meteoric fall. The Catorze mass, weighing 92 pounds, was found near Catorze, San Luis, Potosi, in 1885. It is one of the caillite group of Stanislas Meunier, and shows the Widmanstätten lines very finely. Analysis: Fe 90.09; Ni and Co 9.07; P 0.24; with specific gravity 7.509.

On Objects of Ethnological Interest Exhibited by Clem. D. Webb, from South Africa.

On Objects of Ethnological Interest Exhibited by Clem. D. Webb, from South Africa.