Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/193

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and it was this word which, with the plant itself, had been taken by the Portuguese pilot of Pigafetta to Brazil more than thirty-five years before! Comment seems superfluous.

It is in connection with Cartier's account of smoking among the St. Lawrence tribes, however, that the author achieves still more amazing results. Being unable to deny Cartier's definite description and as no- prior Negro influence here could, even by Professor Wiener, be assumed, it is necessary for him to show that the practice among the Iroquoian tribes at Montreal and Quebec was of recent introduction. His "evi- dence" for this rests in part on direct misquotations and misunderstand- ings, and in part on a failure to comprehend the character of Indian life and the conditions prevailing in eastern North America in the early sixteenth century; and includes a most absurd attempt at derivation. Professor Wiener states (p. 137) that Cartier "mentions figs, cloves and cinnamon, oranges, almonds and apples as known to the Indians and possessing Indian names." Later (p. 144) he adds "prunes" to this list. He first suggests (pp. 137, 145) that the Hurons knew of these tropical products through contact with the Breton fishermen who had preceded Cartier on the Canadian coast. Later (p. 146) he adopts the theory that the Hurons "were before the middle of the sixteenth century in some relation, apparently commercial, with Europeans on the Gulf of Mexico," and there obtained not only "oranges, cinnamon and cloves" but also tobacco for the first time. Further proof of this extraordinary theory is found in the supposed derivation of the Micmac, Abnaki and Natick words for tobacco from the Mande Negro "taba," while the Huron term is declared to be derived from the Arawak and Carib "iouli," which in turn goes back to a Mandingo form "duli" (pp. 184-5).

One is tempted to apply to this the term "balderdash" which the author uses in speaking of Columbus' writings, and while the whole is hardly worthy of serious comment, yet as it is typical of much of the author's whole method, it may be worth while to discuss it briefly. Professor Wiener in the first place directly misquotes his sources. Cartier does not say that the Indians had names for all of the seven articles which he enumerates, and he gives the names only for four of them, viz., figs, plums ("prunes" in English is not the equivalent of" prunes" in French!) cloves and cinnamon. The use of "apples" in Cartier's text is, as Professor Wiener failed to note, due to a misprint of "pommes" for "prunes." In the second place, the author accepts without the slightest apparent investigation, the identification of oranges, figs, etc., with Old World fruits. What, however, may reasonably be inferred

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