The same material made into great hats like inverted baskets protects the coolie from the sun, while the laborers in the rice fields go about looking like animated haycocks in waterproof coats made of the dried leaves of the bamboo sewn together.” Materials for Basketry. In North America the Indians have had no such resource as the bamboo, but with tireless sagacity they have laid under contribution either for food or for the arts every gift of the soil. In seeking materials for basketry, for example, they have surveyed the length and breadth of the continent, testing in every plant the qualities of root, stem, bark, leaf, fruit, seed and gum, so far as these promised the fibres or the dyes for a basket, a wallet, a carrier. With all the instinct of scientific research they have sought materials strong, pliant, lasting and easily divided lengthwise for refined fabrics. In his work on “Indian Basketry” Mr. Otis T. Mason has a picture of a bam-shi-bu coiled basket, having a foundation of three shoots of Hind’s willow, sewn in the lighter portions with carefully prepared roots of kahum, a sedge; while its ornamental designs are executed in roots of a bulrush, the tsuwish. Often a basket, as in this case, is built of materials found miles apart, each requiring patient and skilful treatment at the artist’s hands. A few trees, the cedar in particular, lend themselves to the needs of the basketmaker with a generous array of resources. Mats of large size made from its inner bark are common among the Indians of the Northern Pacific Coast. From the roots of the same tree hats are woven as well as vessels so close in texture as to be watertight. When the roots are boiled so as to be readily torn into fibres, these are formed into thread, either woven with whale-sinews or with kelp-thread as warp. Among the handsomest of all Indian baskets are those of the Pomo tribe, one of which is shown on page 109. The splints for their creamy groundwork are made from the rootstock of the _Carex barbarae_, which are dug from the earth with clam shells and sticks, a woman securing fifteen to twenty strands in a day. These she places in water over night to keep them flexible, and to soften the scaly bark which is afterward removed. To make a basket watertight the Indians of Oregon weave the inner bark of their maple with the utmost closeness. In other regions a simpler method is to apply as water-proofing the gum of the piñon, the resins of pines, or mineral asphalt. Equal diligence and sagacity mark the Indians as users of stone. The Shastas heat a stone of such quality that in cooling it splits into flakes for weapons and tools. They place an obsidian pebble on an anvil, and with an agate chisel divide it as they wish; all three being chosen from a vast diversity of stones which must have been tried and found, inferior. Aluminium and Its Uses.