[316] The agency of the women in applying the arrow “poison” was noted by Hardy; cf. p. 258.
[317] Travels, p. 286.
[318] This identification may possibly be correct; the collocation of the totem with the turtle was shaped through unwilling and perhaps misleading responses made by Mashém to inquiries in 1894—these responses denoting a sea monster which in the beginning helped the Ancient of Pelicans to make the world by pushing from below, and which is now very good food—a description apparently fitting the turtle more closely than the other animal.
[319] Perhaps the closest parallel in this respect is that found in the elaborate marriage regulations prevailing among the Australian aborigines, as described by Spencer and Gillen, Walter E. Roth, and other modern observers.
[320] It may be observed that Kolusio, when visited in January, 1896, failed to corroborate the descriptions of Mashém and the matrons; but his failure occasioned little surprise for the reason that he has not lived with his tribe since early boyhood, and is equally uninformed (or uncommunicative) concerning the myths, ceremonies, and even the totems of the tribe.
[321] The Beginning of Marriage, American Anthropologist, vol. IX, 1896, pp. 371-383.
[322] Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc. in the Captivity of John Giles, Esq., Commander of the Garrison on Saint George river, in the District of Maine. Written by Himself. Originally published at Boston, 1736. Printed for William Dodge. Cincinnati: Spiller & Gates, printers, 168 Vine street. 1869.—P. 45.
[323] The History of Carolina, etc., by John Lawson (1714), reprint of 1860, pp. 302-303. Attention was called to this passage by Mr James Mooney.
[324] The remarkable race-sense of the tribe, with the conjugal conation in which it seems to root, are discussed ante, pp. 160*-163*. There is nothing to indicate, and much to contraindicate, that the Seri are consciously engaged in stirpiculture; yet their social and fiducial devices would seem to be no less effective in developing race-sense, with its concomitants, than were those of prehistoric men in developing the physical attributes of animal associates, such as the wool-bearing of the sheep, the egg-laying of the fowl, and the milk-giving of the cow; or the still more striking mental attributes, such as the servility of the horse, the fidelity of the dog, and the domesticity of the cat. All these attributes are artificial, though not consciously so to their producers, hardly even to modern users; they are by-products of long-continued breeding and exercise, commonly directed toward collateral ends (as when the horse was bred for speed, the dog for hunting, and the fowl and cat for beauty); and, similarly, the Seri race-sense would seem to be largely a by-product of faith-shaped customs designed primarily to propitiate or invoke mystical potencies—yet the collateral effect is not diminished because overlooked in the primary motive.
[325] Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol. III, 1877 (Tribes of California, by Stephen Powers), pp. 56, 98.