Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/202

 192 Reviews,

Archaeological Report, 1899: being part of Appendix to THE Report of the Minister of Education, Ontario. Printed by order of the Legislative Assembly. Toronto : Warwick Brothers & Rutter, 1900.

In the foregoing pages I have drawn the attention of readers oi Fo Ik- Lore to Mr. Boyle's interesting Report for 1898. He has followed it with a Report for 1899, as interesting and in many respects as valuable. An excellent figure of an Iroquois medicine-man's mask, recently obtained for the museum, is given, together with a variant of the myth of the origin of the False Faces. Mr. Boyle made another journey in the previous September to the Iroquois Reserve, to learn further details connected with the cere- monies, especially those relating to the gambling games. These are all recorded.

Included in the Report is a monograph on the Wyandots, by Mr. W. E. Connelley. To this monograph special importance is, I think justly, attached by Mr. Boyle, for it is the outcome of twenty years' study of the Wyandots and their language. Accord- ing to the author's information, the Wyandots originally called themselves the Turtle People. The ancient, not necessarily the original, divisions of the tribe were —

"First division : i. Bear; 2, Deer; 3, Snake; 4, Hawk. "Second division : i. Big Turde ; 2, Little Turde ; 3, Mud Turtle ; 4, Beaver ; 5, Porcupine ; 6, Striped Turtle ; 7, Highland Turde, or Prairie Turtle. " Mediator, executive power, umpire, the wolf."

The wolf, it seems, never belonged to either division, or phratry, " bearing the relation of cousin to each of them." The wolf clan had the right to elect and depose the chief of the tribe. The clans of each division, or phratry, bore the relation of brother to each other. Consequently marriage was prohibited between them, though this law had been modified so as to prohibit marriage only between members of the same clan, at a time before the Methodist missionaries went among them.

The unit of the social and political system "was not the family, nor the individual, but the clan. The child belonged to its clan first, to its parents afterwards. Each clan had its list of proper names, and this list was its exclusive property, which no other clan could appropriate or use. . ., When death left unused any of