made of a number of reed whistles, differing in length, placed side by side.

CUSTOMS

Until within recent years the Pima had many ceremonial observances, songs, games, etc., but these have been largely abandoned. Unlike the Apache, Navaho, and some other southwestern tribes, these people eat fish, ducks, chickens, and indeed everything obtainable that enters into the dietary of the white man. The only native drink, now rarely made, is a wine manufactured from the juice of the saguaro, or giant cactus.

The older women have tattooed lines on the chin, and frequently a single line from the external angle of each eye backward. The young neither tattoo nor paint.

The hair of the women, who go bareheaded more often than the men, from exposure to the sun becomes superficially of a more or less rusty color. To overcome this blemish they dye their hair with the juice of the mesquite, mixing this substance, which is obtained by boiling the inspissated exudation found especially on old trees, with fine river mud. This paste is applied for one or two nights and washed off in the morning, and the treatment causes the hair to remain beautifully black and glossy for a long time.

When a man dies the rafters of his house are taken down and neatly arranged over his grave (pl. IX, 2), which is so dug as to be spacious at the base and small at the top. Some of the Pima still deposit with the body, as before mentioned, various domestic articles.

The younger element in the tribe has enthusiastically adopted the outdoor games of the whites, particularly foot-ball. Baseball was also in favor until one of the players was killed by a batted ball. The larger villages have each a creditable foot-ball team trained by natives who have been educated in the higher Indian schools.

Of native out-door games the Pima and Maricopa until recently played each fall a great ball-kicking game called by the Pima wi-če-ta and by the Maricopa hu-ná-wak. The game is still in vogue among the Papago, but the Pima and Maricopa have abandoned it, believing that it was not viewed with favor by the Indian department. The game was described as follows: Several balls (ron-dul) were made from uh-řa-pe-tek, the gum that develops from a parasitic attack on the grease-wood (řij-koh). Occasionally the

balls consisted of a core of wood covered with gum; and in ancient times the core was of stone, but smaller. A specimen of the latter sort was obtained by the writer at the Pima village of Casa Blanca. Each of two villages selected a runner, expert in the game, who was accompanied by twenty or thirty of his villagers on horseback. The course usually extended from one village to another, a distance of six to ten miles. Starting at one of the villages, each runner laid his ball on the ground, then picked it up upon the dorsum of the bare foot, and with the same motion threw it forward as far as possible, at the same instant starting to run. When the ball was reached, it was again picked up with the foot and thrown, and this operation was repeated as rapidly as possible until the goal was reached, he whose ball reached the goal first winning the contest. The horse

men followed or accompanied the players, those of the racer in the lead aiming to confuse and to retard the progress of his opponent by causing their horses to raise as much dust as possible. Each party also aided their runner by telling him where his ball had fallen or rolled. As the course was in no way prepared for the contest, it often happened that a ball would roll into the brush, and only the watchfulness of the horsemen prevented it from becoming difficult to find or even entirely lost. A player was never permitted to touch the ball with his hands. If it fell into a hole and could not be recovered, or was lost and could not be found for a given. length of time, the racer was furnished with another. It is said that the most expert players could cast the ball with the foot and run so fast to overtake it that it was necessary for the accompanying horsemen to keep up a constant gallop. Contestants in this game would falter only if the ball were lost. The winner was usually rewarded only by the honor that success brought to him and his villagers, but there was much betting on the result between the people of the two contesting settlements. The Papago of southern Arizona played this game, during one of their celebrations, as late as March, 1905.

The medical practices and other particulars concerning the Pima will be published in a forthcoming bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology.

UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM,

WASHINGTON, D. C.

TRADITIONS OF PRECOLUMBIAN EARTHQUAKES AND VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS IN WESTERN

SOUTH AMERICA

BY ADOLPH F. BANDELIER

The information contained in this paper is limited and fragmentary. Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile were necessarily included in the writer's documentary investigations, but as he did not visit these countries, what is said about them is incomplete. Nor can the subject be treated from the standpoint of physiography, through lack of specific knowledge, hence the paper will be devoted to a record of the Indian traditions preserved from the time of the earliest Spanish occupancy or by modern investigators, with an attempt to determine in what degree they may be accepted as purely primitive lore.

In Colombia, the most northerly country of South America on the Pacific coast, traditions regarding a mythical personage, or personages, called Bochica, Nemquetheba, and Zuhé, in the Muysca or Chibcha idiom of Bogotá, may possibly refer to violent seismic disturbances in precolumbian times. The Bishop of Panamá, Lucas Fernandez Piedrahita (1), in his work published in 1688, states:

"Of the Bochica, they refer in particular to many favors he conferred upon them, as to say, that through overflows of the river Funzha, in which the artifices of Huythaca played a part, the plain or level of Bogotá had been flooded, and the waters so increased that the natives were compelled to settle on the tops of the highest mountains where they remained until Bochica came, and, striking a mountain range with a stick, opened an outlet for the waters, which forthwith left the level land, so that it became habitable as before, and the forces of the repressed waters in damaging and breaking the rocks was so great that they formed the fall of Tequendama, so famous as one of the wonders of the world.”(2)

In his writings (3) Fray Pedro Simon antedated Piedrahita by about 44 years. He agrees with him on certain points, but attributes the overflow of the plateau of Bogotá to a deity which he