Salinity.—The saltest surface water is found in (a) the Arabian Sea and (b) along a belt extending from West Australia to South Africa, the highest salinity in this belt occurring at the Australian end. South of the belt salinity falls quickly as latitude increases, while to the north of it, in the monsoon region, the surface water is very fresh off the African coast and to the north-east. Little is known with certainty about the distribution of salinity in the depths, the number of trustworthy observations available being still very small. Probably the northern and north-eastern region, within the monsoon area, contains relatively fresh water down to very considerable depths.
Circulation.—North of the equator the surface circulation is under the control of the monsoons, and changes with them, the currents consisting chiefly of north-east and south-west drifts in the open sea, and induced streams following the coasts. During the northern summer the south-west monsoon, which is sufficiently strong to bring navigation practically to a standstill except for powerful steamers, sets up a strong north-easterly drift in the Arabian Sea, and the water removed from the east African coast is replaced by the upwelling of cold water from below; this is one of the best illustrations of this action extant. Along the line of the equator the Indian counter-current flows eastwards all the year round, acting as compensation to the great Equatorial current flowing westwards between the parallels of 7° and 20° S. The equatorial current, on meeting the northern extremity of Madagascar, sends a branch southwards along the east coast of that island, sometimes called the Mascarene current. When the main equatorial current reaches the African coast a minor stream is sent northwards to the source of the Indian counter-current, but the discharge is chiefly by the Mozambique current, which south of Cape Corrientes becomes the Agulhas current, one of the most powerful stream currents of the globe. On the west coast of Madagascar and on the banks of the African coast south of 30° S., reaction currents or “back-drifts” move in the opposite direction along the flanks of the Agulhas current; these back-drifts are of great importance to navigation. On clearing the land south of the Cape the waters of the Agulhas current meet those of the west wind drift of the Southern Ocean, and mingle with them in such a manner as to produce, by interdigitation, alternate strips of warm and cold water, which are met with at great distances south-west and south of the Cape. Between South Africa and Australia the waters form a part of the great west wind drift. The waters of this drift are, in general, of very low temperature, but it is remarkable that the interdigitation just mentioned continues far to the eastward, at least as far as Kerguelen. This fact is probably due partly to the actual intrusion of warm water from the Mascarene current east of Madagascar, and partly to the circumstance that the different temperatures of the waters are so compensated by their differences of salinity that they have almost precisely the same specific gravity in situ. The west wind drift sends a stream northwards along the west coast of Australia, the West Australia current, the homologue of the Benguela current in the South Atlantic. The principal feature in the circulation in the depths of the Indian Ocean is a slow movement of Antarctic water northwards along the bottom to take the place of that removed from the surface by evaporation, and by currents in the lower latitudes. Little is known beyond the bare fact that such movement does take place.
(H. N. D.)
INDIANOLA, a city and the county-seat of Warren county, Iowa, U.S.A., about 18 m. S. by E. of Des Moines. Pop. (1890) 2254; (1900) 3261; (1905) 3396; (1910) 3283. It is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific railways. Indianola is the seat of Simpson College (coeducational, Methodist Episcopal, 1867), with a college of liberal arts, an academy, a school of education, a school of business, a school of shorthand and typewriting, a conservatory of music, a school of oratory, a school of art and a military academy. In 1908 the college had 32 instructors and 905 students. The city lies in a rich farming region, and has a considerable trade in butter and eggs, vegetables and fruits, and in coal, lumber and live stock from the surrounding country. Indianola was laid out and was selected as the county-seat in 1849, and building began in the following year; it was incorporated as a town in 1864, and was chartered as a city of the second class in 1884.
INDIANS, NORTH AMERICAN. The name of “American Indians” for the aborigines of America had its origin in the use by Columbus, in a letter (February 1493) written soon after the discovery of the New World, of the The name “American Indians.” term Indios (i.e. natives of India) for the hitherto unknown human beings, some of whom he brought back to Europe with him. He believed, as did the people of his age in general, that the islands which he had discovered by sailing westward across the Atlantic were actually a part of India, a mistaken idea which later served, to suggest many absurd theories of the origin of the aborigines, their customs, languages, culture, &c. From Spanish the word, with its incorrect connotation, passed into French (Indien), Italian and Portuguese (Indio), German (Indianer), Dutch (Indiane), &c. When the New World came to be known as America, the natives received, in English especially, the name “American Indians,” to distinguish them from the “Indians” of south-eastern Asia and the East Indies. The appellation “Americans” was for a long time used in English to designate, not the European colonists, but the aborigines, and when, in 1891, Dr D. G. Brinton published his notable monograph on the Indians he entitled it The American Race, recalling the early employment of the term. The awkwardness of such a term as “American Indian,” both historically and linguistically, led Major J. W. Powell, the founder of the Bureau of American Ethnology, to put forward as a substitute “Amerind,” an arbitrary curtailment which had the advantage of lending itself easily to form words necessary and useful in ethnological writings, e.g. pre-Amerind, post-Amerind, pseudo-Amerind, Amerindish, Amerindize, &c. Purists have objected strenuously to “Amerind,” but the word already has a certain vogue in both English and French. Indeed, Professor A. H. Keane does not hesitate, in The World’s Peoples (London, 1908), to use “Amerinds” in lieu of “American Indians.” Other popular terms for the American Indians, which have more or less currency, are “Red race,” “Red men,” “Redskins,” the last not in such good repute as the corresponding German Rothäute, or French Peaux-rouges, which have scientific standing. The term “American Indians” covers all the aborigines of the New World past and present, so far as is known, although some European writers, especially in France, still seek to separate from the “Redskins” the Aztecs, Mayas, Peruvians, &c., and some American authorities would (anatomically at least) rank the Eskimo as distinct from the Indian proper. When the name “Indian” came to be used by the European colonists and their descendants, they did not confine it to “wild men,” but applied it to many things that were wild, strange, non-European in the new environment (see Journ. Amer. Folk-Lore, 1902, pp. 107-116; Handbook of Amer. Inds., 1907, pt. i. pp. 605-607). Thus more than one hundred popular names of plants in use in American English (e.g. “Indian corn,” “Indian pink,” &c.) contain references to the Indian in this way; also many other things, such as “Indian file,” “Indian ladder,” “Indian gift,” “Indian pudding,” “Indian summer.” The Canadian-French, who termed the Indian sauvage (i.e. “savage”), remembered him linguistically in botte sauvage (moccasin), traîne sauvage (toboggan). The term “Siwash,” in use in the Chinook jargon of the North Pacific coast, and also in the English of that region, for “Indian” is merely a corruption of this Canadian-French appellation. In the literature relating to the Pacific coast there is mention even of “Siwash Indians.” Throughout Canada and the United States the term “Indian” occurs in hundreds of place-names of all sorts (“Indian River,” “Indian Head,” “Indian Bay,” “Indian Hill,” and the like). There are besides these Indiana and its capital Indianapolis. In Newfoundland “Red Indian,” as the special term for the Beothuks, forms part of a number of place-names. Pope’s characterization of the American aborigine,
| “Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind,” |
is responsible for the creation in the mind of the people of a “Mr Lo,” who figures in newspaper lore, cartoons, &c. The reputations, deserved and undeserved, of certain Indian tribes north of Mexico have been such that their names have passed into English or into the languages of other civilized nations of Europe as synonyms for “ruffian,” “thug,” “rowdy,” &c. Recently “les Apaches” have been the terror of certain districts of Paris, as were the “Mohocks” (Mohawks) for certain parts of London toward the close of the 18th century.
The North American Indians have been the subject of numerous popular fallacies, some of which have gained world-wide currency. Here belongs a mass of pseudo-scientific and thoroughly unscientific literature embodying absurd and extravagant Popular fallacies. theories and speculations as to the origin of the aborigines and their “civilizations” which derive them (in most extraordinary ways sometimes), in recent or in remote antiquity, from all regions of the Old World—Egypt and Carthage, Phoenicia and Canaan, Asia Minor and the Caucasus, Assyria and Babylonia, Persia and India, Central Asia and Siberia, China and Tibet, Korea, Japan, the East Indies, Polynesia, Greece and ancient Celtic Europe and even medieval Ireland and Wales. Favourite theories of this sort have made the North American aborigines the descendants of refugees from sunken Atlantis, Tatar warriors, Malayo-Polynesian sea-farers, Hittite immigrants from Syria, the “Lost Ten Tribes of Israel,” &c., or attributed their social, religious and political ideas and institutions to the advent of stray junks from Japan, Buddhist votaries from south-eastern Asia, missionaries from early Christian Europe, Norse vikings, Basque fishermen and the like.