BOOK REVIEWS 385
satisfaction of some collecting impulse rather than as an attempt to solve a problem. Such works have their value; but it is well to recognize that it is only as providers of the raw materials of science. If the author's interest had been really ethnological or historical, he would scarcely have failed to go into the details of native maize culture, to ascertain its ramifications and adaptations, to learn, for instance, precisely how Indian agriculture has developed or utilized the varieties of the plant. A com- parison with the Zuni and Tewa studies, or the Californian ones of Barrows and Chestnut, might have led to findings of wider import. It could at any rate have been attempted: even a negative result would be of value. Then there is the question, which is almost always avoided in work of this character, of what plants the natives might have used but did not. That they were ingenious in finding things to eat and drug themselves with is a fact that may still astound the unlearned, but will not cause the least ripple among scientists. We want to know the limits of their ingenuity, and the causes of the limitation; which means a collation and integration of the plant lore and plant employment of a tribe with the whole of its culture. That four tribes used 170 different plants will have quite different significance according as the flora of their region numbers 200 or 2000 species. Ethnobotanical studies of the sort to which this undertaking and most of its predecessors belong have got into a way of being passed over by ethnologists with polite commendation and the thought that botanists may be interested in that kind of thing, while botanists seem to dismiss them as probably useful to ethnologists.
A. L. KROEBER
SOME NEW PUBLICATIONS
Goddard, Pliny Earle. Notes on the Sun Dance of the Sarsi. Notes on the Sun Dance of the Cree in Alberta. (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. xvi, pt. 4,
pp. 271-282, 295-310, 3 figs.) New York, 1919.
Hrdlicka, Ales. Physical Anthropology. The Wistar Ii /^"tute: Philadelphia, 1919. 8vo. 164 pp., 4 pis.
Lowie, Robert H. Sun Dance of the Shoshoni, Ute, and Hidatsa. (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. xvi, pt. 5, pp. 387-410, 411-431, 4 figs.) New York, 1919.
, . The Tobacco Society of the Crow Indiana. (Anthro- pological Papers of the American Musei.^ of Natural History ,v yol. xxi, pt. 2, pp. 101-200, 13 figs.) New York, 1919.
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