many incisions in the flesh of the sick person in the place where he feels the pain. After that they suck the blood, either with the mouth or with the end of a bison horn, which they have sawed off and of which they have made a kind of cone (cornet) which they apply to the place. This is what they call a bleeding. (Dumont, 1753, vol. 1, pp. 172–173; Swanton, 1911, pp. 80–81.)

Du Pratz and other Louisiana writers express high regard for the efficacy of Indian treatments, but the recovery of men living in the manner of the ancient Natchez is less to be wondered at now that we understand how much nature will bear and do by herself. Du Pratz states that he sent to France more than 300 simples obtained from the natives "with their numbers, and a memorandum which detailed their qualities and taught the manner of using them" (Du Pratz, 1758, vol. 1, pp. 211-212; Swanton, 1911, pp. 83-84). He himself extols the virtues of the sweet gum, a vine he calls "the barbed creeper," the China root, the maidenhair fern, the ground ivy, and some other native productions (Du Pratz, 1758, vol. 2, pp. 28-29, 55-58, 60–62; Swanton, 1911, pp. 84-85). The Natchez also used the sweat bath, and I am sure all physicians will be glad to learn the following simple remedy for insanity, an Indian secret revealed to us by Dumont de Montigny :

To what I have already said [on the subject of the native doctors] I will add here something about their method of curing lunatics, those who have lost their senses on account of some fear or by some other accident. It is this which the savages call "no longer having a soul (esprit)." For there are insane in Louisiana as well as in Europe, and it is there that one can say truly that all the insane are not in the Petites-Maisons, because such establishments are entirely unknown among these barbarians. Here is the method followed by the Alexis in treating this sickness.

These savage doctors use on these occasions neither baths, nor bleedings, nor any of the remedies which are in use among ourselves for such maladies. They merely take lettuce seed (graine de laitue) and nuts with their shells on, in equal measure, and having placed all in a mortar, or more correctly in an Indian crusher, they crush them and pound them until they form a kind of opiate (or paste?), two or three drahms of which they make their sick people take morning and evening. With this single remedy they cure them completely. (Dumont, 1753, vol. 2, pp. 278–279.)

The writer obtained the names of a considerable number of plants used as medicines from a Natchez informant in the Cherokee country south of Fort Gibson. It was still believed that animals caused diseases. When a man becomes sick at the stomach and vomited it was thought that a dead person was eating out of the same dish with him. Doctors would blow into pots of medicine and sing appropriate songs for each, facing the east as they did so. Sometimes they addressed the four points of the compass in which case they began with the north and ended with the east as with the Creeks. They always got bark, roots, or limbs from the east side of a tree or bush because that was the good luck quarter and stood for strength

while the west meant weakness and death (Swanton, 1928, pp. 666670). The little that we know regarding the medical practices of other lower Mississippi tribes discloses nothing differing in any manner from the corresponding customs of the Natchez. For a general study of medicinal plants in this area, consult Lydia Averrill Taylor (1940). For Caddo medical practices, see Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 132 (Swanton, 1942, pp. 219–226).

CONCLUSION

The material assembled in the present bulletin seems to support the thesis that human culture in a natural physiographic area tends to remain constant, or evolve at the same rate, that units of alien population entering it tend to become absorbed by the culture they find, while units separating from it tend to abandon much of the culture they took with them. This is true when the cultures of the peoples concerned do not vary too widely, and it does not mean that culture is absolutely dependent on environment, or that past history has no bearing on present condition. Diverse origins of units in any natural area are marked by lags in the movement toward conformity which are of different rates in different series of cultural features. Upon the whole this lag is least pronounced in items of material culture and such intangibles as are not clothed with peculiar social or religious value, greater in factors of social and ceremonial organization, still greater in linguistic differences, and ordinarily greatest of all in physical characteristics. Where, as in the Southeastern province, physical characteristics are not sufficiently marked to be the occasion for emotional attitudes a steady mixture of these features with all the rest is likely to take place so that no accurate classification involving all of them is possible. Some tribes may be placed definitely in one or another category but in certain cases it cannot be done. Language, on the other hand, gives us a clear-cut categorization and is upon the whole the most useful single criterion for this purpose. Our principal difficulty here is that there has been a tendency to indicate linguistic stocks or families as if they were all of equal weight and as if the differences between them were equal, but, as has been shown by Professor Sapir and his pupils, whether they are actually related or not, North American stocks may be ranged in about half a dozen main structural groups and the stocks themselves do not differ by equal increments. In the eastern part of North America, for instance, the great Algonquian stock to the north and east seems to diverge fundamentally from all the rest. A secondary distinction is to be drawn between the Caddoan and Iroquoian peoples on one side and the Muskhogean-Siouans on the other, including in the latter probably the other small stocks of the Southeast.

Algonquian people had penetrated the area under consideration along the eastern seaboard so as to include Chesapeake Bay and the Sound region of North Carolina. At a much later period a central Algonquian tribe, the Shawnee, settled upon Cumberland River and still later gave off branches to the southward which added significant elements to the histories of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. One small division of the Illinois Confederation, the Michigamea, reached northeastern Arkansas before the coming of the whites, but their history is really part of that of the upper Mississippi Valley and they require scant notice here.

Iroquoians were represented by four tribes, or confederations of tribes, in the area under consideration. One of these, the Tuscarora, with which the Coree and Neusiok were perhaps affiliated, were settled upon the Roanoke, Neuse, Tar, and Pamlico Rivers; on the Meherrin River was a small related tribe of that name; and beyond them the Nottoway, also on a river which perpetuates their name. After the Tuscarora War of 1711-13 that tribe and its immediate allies moved north and united with the Five Nations of the Iroquois. More significant in the history of the Southeast were the Cherokee, who spoke a language diverging considerably from other Iroquoian tongues. They occupied the region of the southern Appalachians to which they had perhaps descended at a rather recent period from homes farther north. The Caddoan stock was represented by a group of tribes bearing the general name Caddo, living in and near the point where the States of Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma come together.

The Siouan peoples were represented in four different areas. Two of these were occupied by single tribes, and a third by 20 tribes or more which covered most of the Piedmont region of Virginia and North and South Carolina besides the Coastal Plain of South Carolina between Cape Fear River and Bull Bay. It also extended over most of West Virginia and an indefinite distance westward. These tribes formed two distinct dialectic groups: a northern, in Virginia and to the westward; and a southern, in the Carolinas. One of the two isolated tribes, the Biloxi, was about the bay which has received its name and on Pascagoula River, while the other was along the lower course of the Yazoo in the present State of Mississippi. This last, the Ofo, however, descended from the Ohio River region at a very late period, and it is believed that the appearance of the Biloxi near the Gulf of Mexico was also late. At the mouth of Arkansas River was a Siouan tribe, the Quapaw, connected with the great western division of this family.

The Muskhogean stock is the stock of the Southeast par excellence. It occupied the central section, the very heart of the Gulf region

from the Mississippi River to the Savannah and from the Tennessee to the Gulf excepting for minor areas already indicated. As originally defined by Powell, it embraced two powerful peoples, the Choctaw in the southwest and the Creek Confederation in the east and center, each speaking a distinct language and possessed of a distinct cultural life. Intermediate were the Chickasaw which spoke the language of the former but shared numerous cultural features with the latter. The Apalachee seem to have been related by language to the Choctaw, but little is known of their cultural pattern. There were several smaller tribes which shared the culture either of the Choctaw or the Creeks. On the Mississippi, however, was a group, represented most conspicuously by the Natchez, which spoke a widely divergent Muskhogean tongue and had a correspondingly divergent culture. In the opposite direction we find a similar condition in northern Florida, where the Timucua tribes also had divergent Muskhogean languages, or a divergent language, and corresponding customs. The connections of the inhabitants of southern Florida are unknown but they are believed to have been more directly with the Choctaw and Apalachee. A near neighbor of the Natchez on the Mississippi was the Tunica group, including five tribes; westward of the mouth of the Mississippi, the Chitimacha group of three tribes; and, extending beyond them to the neighborhood of Galveston, the Atakapa, with certain connected tribes in the interior of Texas beyond the Trinity. Westward of the Atakapa again were other small linguistic groups, the Karankawa, Tonkawa, Coahuilteco, and Tamaulipeco, constituting either widely divergent languages of one stock or several small independent families. Little has been preserved of these languages and their past history and affiliations are highly problematical, yet it is not impossible that they were connected with the Siouan-Muskhogean languages as part of a larger whole extending to California, where they are supposed to have been represented by the great Hokan family. This is the theory of Sapir and there is considerable to support it. In any case, the Tunica, the Chitimacha, the Atakapa, and their allies are believed to have belonged to one stock which is in close structural agreement with the Muskhogean and Siouan languages. From the Atakapa, inclusive, westward the tribes actually fall outside of the cultural area of the Southeast.

COMMON CULTURAL CHARACTERS

In the discussion which follows I shall deal principally with the Algonquians of the Northeast, the Siouans of the Northeast interior, the Creeks, Timucua, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Natchez, Tunica, Chitimacha, and Caddo, material from the remaining tribes

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being very fragmentary. It must be pointed out at the beginning that some features peculiar to certain areas may be traced directly to physiographic differences. Thus, the lives of the Cherokee were affected considerably by their location in the southern Appalachians and those of the coastal Algonquians and Calusa, for instance, by adjustment to a littoral existence. The difference in life zones also reacted upon the cultures of the people, the Cherokee and some of the Virginia Siouans including within their territory the only fragments of the Boreal region and the Transitional zone of the Austral region to be found in the Southeast, and the southern Florida Indians falling into the Tropical zone. The uniformity in culture which the Southeast as a whole exhibits undoubtedly is connected with the fact that the greater part of it is in one zone, the Lower Austral, and most of the remainder in the closely related Upper Austral. Differences observable among the Cherokee and in southern Florida are undoubtedly attributable in some measure to environment. Those Cherokee cultural elements which show divergencies from the Southeastern area as a whole and resemblances with Iroquois features may, of course, be set down as holdovers from former stock association. If, as seems probable, the tribes of southern Florida were related to the Apalachee and Choctaw, the peculiarities of their culture may fairly be attributed to the influence exerted by the natural area in which they had settled. On the other hand, when we find tribes scattered through the same natural area from the Atlantic to Texas exhibiting variations, we know that some factor other than present environment has been at work. Such general cultural variations are reinforced in many cases by physical or linguistic differences, but in other cases these are weak or absent and we have to fall back on an inherent tendency of the human mind to vary independently of any variation in the external world.

To begin with, certain cultural characteristics are found practically throughout the area in question. So far as we are aware the natural environment was exploited in about the same manner and to the same extent everywhere. Corn, beans, pumpkins and squashes, and a species of tobacco were raised by all of the tribes from Virginia to Louisiana. The only exceptions seems to have been the tribes of southern Florida and the marginal tribes of the southwest, including the Atakapa and Tonkawa. These last seemed not to have adjusted themselves to horticultural life partly on account of the sudden drop in rainfall in their territories and partly because of the greater attractions of fishing on the coast and bison hunting in the interior. We know that southern Florida was suited to corn culture because the Seminole who occupied it at a later period and