Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/706

688 for the seventh, time his theory, based on the legend of Quetzalcoatl, of a pre-Columbian settlement of America by the Irish. The Marqnis de Nadaillac presented the evidence in favor of the population of America in the diluvial period. The Abbé Petitot, long a missionary in British North America, controverted him, affirming that the land was then in the bed of the sea. The Canadian Indians, he said, had a tradition of the world having been overwhelmed by snow. The abbé also told of the creation-myths of the Chiglit Eskimos of the mouth of Mackenzie River, who trace their origin to a giant beaver, living on an island in the western sea. He had two sons. One went eastward to America. From him are derived the Chiglits who wear sticks in their lips. The other went west, to Asia. From him are descended the western Eskimos, called blowers, and, as the Chiglits believe, the Europeans. The island of the tradition was believed to be Bobrovia, or Castor Island, in Bering Sea. The abbé showed a number of utensils of the Mackenzie River tribes and the western Eskimos, which went to confirm, by their resemblance, the tradition of a common origin. M. Raymond Pilet gave some illustrations of the music of the Guatemalan Indians. Not much can be said of their vocal music. For instruments they have a drum and a flute or flageolet, and the marimba, which was introduced by the negroes, and can not be called native. Their melodies, as played by the speaker on the piano, had a pleasant sound.

Dr. Deniker gave an account of the results of the French scientific mission to Cape Horn of himself and Dr. Hyades, during which they had spent several years in Tierra del Fuego. They had examined members of three tribes as to their physical peculiarities and differences. Photographs had been brought home of living persons, and prepared specimens of the dead; their dwellings had been photographed, and collections made of their utensils, and the way of using them had been represented as well as possible. These results would all be published in a few months. Dr. Deniker spoke of the voyages, hitherto little known, of Frenchmen to Tierra del Fuego, accounts of which are preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. They are those of M. de Beauchesne, about the end of the seventeenth century; of the engineers De Sabat and Du Plessis, who made hydrographic surveys in the Strait of Magellan and along the west coast of South America about the same time; and of the filibuster Jouan dela Gui]baudière, who was shipwrecked in the Strait of Magellan in 1795 and compelled to spend eleven months with the savages. He compiled a vocabulary of more than three hundred words, which is of interest, because it is the earliest collection of Fuegian words we possess. Señor de la Rada y Delgado spoke of the two Maya manuscripts in the Madrid Museum, the Codex Troano and the