Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/830

810 of the desired fineness. This tedious and laborious method has been practiced without improvement from time immemorial, and in some of the arts the Zuñians have actually retrograded."

The above is a faithful description of one of the pueblan mills; I observed a great many of them at Zuni, and elsewhere have said that I "saw standing behind one of the stone slabs where they grind their corn, a pretty Zuñi girl, not a day over a year old, and as naked as the hour she was born, with the stone grinder in her hands, playfully showing her mother, who watched her with no little pride in her face, how to grind the corn. The picture was a charming one, and if the expressions of all could have been caught at the proper moment, what a study it would have made!"

The tiers of houses at Zuñi, in common with a number of the other New Mexican and Arizonian pueblos, are clustered about two open squares or public plazas of no very great size, a portion of one of them being used as a graveyard in front of the abandoned mission church in Zuni. In Fig. 5 of the present article I give the court at Laguna Pueblo of New Mexico, which is there kept clean and neat. This picture well shows the arrangement and relation to each other of these conglomerate homes. In this engraving the annual "corn-dance" of the Lagunas is being performed—a very interesting ceremony.

Thus in the present account I have passed briefly in review the study of the homes which the American Indians build for themselves in these days. The subject could easily be enlarged upon, and, indeed, treated in detail, would fill three or four ample volumes. My labor, however, will have been well repaid should it be the means of inciting the student in anthropology, with a knowledge of the present literature of the subject, to broaden the field by published accounts of his or her own observations. Much yet remains to be carefully studied and compared, much that is yet obscure or totally unknown to science. It must be done in the near future, for already many of the facts are rapidly fading upon the unturned pages of aboriginal American history.

forests of Chaga, the temperate zone of Mount Kilimandjaro, Africa, as described by Dr. W. L. Abbott, have a most curious appearance. The trees, although often of very thick trunks, are not tall but somewhat stunted. The trunks and larger branches are completely covered with orchids, lichens, ferns, and moss. From every limb and twig hang long festoons of gray moss, while the ground is thickly carpeted with ferns of a species resembling "love in a tangle." Some of the huge tree-trunks are perfect botanical gardens, from the number and variety of the plants growing upon them.