DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 1 97
rial, before we shall know all about reindeer nomadism. What we need are facts and research based on serious information. We live to learn and to work.
Finally I may be allowed to quote a passage from a letter of the late Dr. Herman K. Haeberlin, in memory of a friend who was always dear to me. On November I, 1917, our regretted friend wrote me from Colum- bia University, New York, as follows: "I was very much interested in your paper on the reindeer. Aside from its value as the investigation of a concrete cultural trait, its methodology I think is highly instructive for us anthropologists. It shows what can be attained by a scholarly cooperation of direct historical reconstruction and indirect ethnological inference. Furthermore, an important methodological point is that you trace the origin of reindeer domestication to a definite geographical area rather than to a certain tribe. This methodological distinction ought to be borne in mind more clearly than we have thus far done. I shall attempt to make the same point when I discuss the center of dis- tribution of imbricated basketry in North America."
B. LAUFER
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