Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/880

860 a thin uniform sheet over the bottom, and rotated the pestle with the utmost force he could command. Two or three decigrammes of chloroaurate of sodium left 1·8 milligramme of metallic gold. Under the action of the pestle the yellow color of the salt gradually deepened to an olive shade. When water was poured on, the undecomposed salt dissolved, leaving the gold as a delicate purple powder. Half an hour's trituration of half a gramme of the salt resulted in the reduction of 9·2 milligrammes of gold. By a similar operation corrosive sublimate was reduced to metallic calomel. Salts of mercury, platinum, and silver gave results analogous to those obtained with gold.

Value of Tradition.—When Jacques Cartier visited the St. Lawrence River in 1535 he found, where Montreal now is, a strong city exercising an extensive sway, named Hochelaga. When Champlain sailed up the same river, seventy years later, Hochelaga had disappeared and left no trace. The story of the fall of its dominion has never been satisfactorily explained. Mr. Horatio Hale, visiting the Wyandotte Indians a few years ago, found among them coherent traditions of their former residence in the east, and their withdrawal thence to settle near Mackinaw. The interpretation of these traditions, of which the author gives two versions, divested of what is fanciful in them, combined with a few known incidents, points to the expulsion of the Huron tribes from their stronghold of Hochelaga as the result of a war with other tribes of the Iroquois stock. From this lesson Mr. Hale draws important conclusions regarding the value of traditional evidence. "It is plain," he says, "that until recently this evidence has been seriously undervalued. Our students of history have been too generally a book-worshiping race, unwilling to accept any testimony with regard to events that is not found in some contemporary page, either written or printed. It is not half a century since a distinguished English author pronounced the opinion that no tradition can be trusted which is more than a hundred years old. At the time when this opinion was put forth by Sir George C. Lewis, many voyagers and missionaries in the Pacific islands were accumulating traditional testimony of vast and varied origin, which is now admitted on all hands to prove the occurrence of events that must have taken place at successive periods extending over the last two thousand years. The Brief History of the Hawaiian People, by Prof. W. B. Alexander, of Honolulu, published in 1891, 'by order of the Board of Education of the Hawaiian Kingdom,' recounts as unquestionable facts many voyages, migrations, battles, royal and priestly accessions, marriages, and deaths which have occurred in the Sandwich Islands and other groups, from the eleventh century to our own time. At the other extremity of the great ocean the Polynesian Society, established at Wellington, New Zealand, has published in its excellent quarterly journal communications from able contributors relating to various histories, and carrying them back, with the aid of numerous mutually confirmatory genealogies, for many centuries, with unhesitating belief in their general truth. In this way the history of the peopling of the vast Polynesian region, extending over a space larger than North America, and covering at least twenty centuries, is gradually becoming known to us as surely, if not as minutely, as that of the countries of Europe during the same period. The question naturally arises whether we may not hope to recover the history of aboriginal America for at least the same length of time. . . . We have every reason to feel assured that in the three hundred Indian reservations and recognized bands of the United States and Canada, with populations varying from less than a hundred to more than twenty thousand, and comprising many men and women of good education and superior intelligence, there are mines of traditional lore ready to yield returns of inestimable value to well-qualified and sympathetic explorers."

Mashona Granaries.—Grain is stored by the natives of Mashonaland in circular granaries, which are miniature copies of their own huts. Near the source of the Ingazuri River the railroad surveying party unexpectedly came across a collection of fifty or sixty granaries, belonging to a neighboring village, and in charge of two watchmen. "The clean surface of the granite rock formed the floor of the granaries; they were perched on bowlders, without regard to order, where a flat surface offered a favorable location.