NO TES A ND NE IV S 585
tribution among the Amerinds of two feathers laid on flat in arrow feathering. Wherever I have seen any of this type, they are so little affected by contact that I have come to suspect a wider distribution of this form of fearhering before the advent of the whites. Indeed, if the reader will look at any collection of arrows received from the plains of the Great West, he will find that the feather end of the shaft has all the appearance of having been made by machinery. The question of in- dependent invention may also arise in this connection, since, as some of my colleagues would have it, whenever you see a tribe using any particular form of technique, that is an evidence of their own original- ity — the idea of contact between tribes not being evidenced in the slightest degree by the identity of their implements and art products.
O. T. Mason.
How the Amerind Bored a Long Hole in Wood — A dis- tinguished historian of engineering said to the writer only recently : " The archeologists have made it plain to me how the primitive peoples chipped silicious stone ; how they ' bushed ' or hammered friable stone ; how they drilled short holes through stone, ivory, and other hard ma- terials by double cone ; how they sawed, whittled, and chopped ; but I cannot even imagine how the Amerind or other savages bored a long hole in wood to make pipestems, etc." . The answer to this inquiry is easy. In the tropical region, especially of South America, there grow reeds of great length between the joints, so that the natives of British Guiana and elsewhere could make their blow-tubes of a single joint. These were inserted into a cylinder of palm wood and straightened by making one end fast up in a tree and weighting the other end with a heavy stone suspended until the wood was thoroughly seasoned ; after that the tube would not warp or bend.
In the subtropical areas reeds have shorter joints, but they and many other plants have soft pith which is easily removed by means of a hard rod. There is no difficulty in these examples because Nature has furnished the auger ; but on the plains of the Great West, along the great lakes, on the cedar-producing portions of the North Pacific coast, and, indeed, in certain portions of tropical America, a long tube was formed by splitting the stick from end to end, gouging half cavities from the interior of each piece, and then uniting the halves by means of gum and lashing of wet material, which, shrinking, made the whole as solid as ever. So, the pipestem, the lover's flute, the rattle, the inverted reed instrument, and even blow-tubes for arrows with bore ten feet long have been excavated in this way. After the cavity is formed it is easy enough to make it smooth and uniform by pulling,
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