So long and so far as such work is essential to the legitimate work of the department it will have to be done within it. All work beyond this can be left to the Smithsonian Institution, the universities and scientific academies, and individual effort. The Government of the United States is not a scientific body. =American Indians and Mongolians.=--In answer to Major Powell's theory, recently expressed anew, that while there may be a unity of species in the ancient physical man, the civilization, arts, industries, institutions, languages, and opinions of the American tribes were autochthonous, and owed nothing to Old-World influences; Mr. James Wickersham, of Tacoma, Washington, maintains that our Indians are connected in blood with the Mongolian stock of East Asia and none other, and that their arts, etc., were derived thence in comparatively recent times. In the comparison he makes, for argument, between the two races he finds a considerable number of features that were common and peculiar to both. Of both, the Chino-Japanese and the Americans, he says: "The most civilized tribes spoke a monosyllabic language, others spoke an agglutinative tongue; their writing was ideographic and written from right to left, from top to bottom; their systems of numeration were based upon the digital count, and their old numerals up to nineteen were practically identical; their calendar systems were alike in principle, and nearly so in details; both divided time into cycles and quarters thereof; the solar year in both regions began at the winter solstice, and the solstices were celebrated in both lands on the same day by the same national festivals; both prepared almanacs on paper of national manufacture; the good or evil power of every day was fixed by the priest-astronomer, and each almanac also contained medical receipts and astrological formulæ and a table of religious festivals; the same elements, colors, viscera, birds, seasons, and planets were assigned in the same general scheme to the cardinal points." Like similarities are traced in constitutions, laws, ecclesiastical institutions, monastic orders, and physical aspects.