--------+---------------+-----------------+-------------+-------------------+ Museum | Diameter | Depth | Weight | Capacity | No. | | | | | --------+---------------+-----------------+-------------+-------------------+ | | | | | 174528 |38 cm. (15 in.)|9.5 cm. (3¾ in.) |482g. (17oz.)| 6.25 l. (6.6 qt.) | 174528a |23 cm. (9 in.) |5.0cm. (2 in.) |142 g. (5oz.)| 1 l. (1.06 qt.)| --------+---------------+-----------------+-------------+-------------------+ It is impossible to portray justly the food habits of the Seri without some reference to a systematic scatophagy, which seems to possess fiducial as well as economic features. In its simplest aspect this custom is connected with the tuna harvests; the fruits are eaten in enormous quantity, and are imperfectly digested, the hard-coated seeds especially passing through the system unchanged; the feces containing these seeds are preserved with some care, and after the harvest is passed the hoard (desiccated, of course, in the dry climate) is ground between hupf and ahst, and winnowed in baskets precisely as are the mesquite beans; and the product is then eaten either dry or in the form of atole like the mesquite meal. In superficial view this food factor is the precise homologue of the “second harvest” of the California Indians as described by Clavigero, Baegert,[283] and others; but it gains importance, among the Seri at least, as the sole method of storing or preserving food-supplies, and hence as the germ of industrial economy out of which a feeble thrift-sense may be regarded as emerging. And the rise of thrift in Seriland, like esthetic and industrial beginnings generally, is shaped by faith and attendant ceremony; for the doubly consumed food is credited with intensified powers and virtues, and held to be specially potent in the relief of hunger and in giving endurance for the hard warpath or prolonged chase; it is—and makes—very strong (“mucho fuerte”), in the laconic and confident explanation of Mashém. Incongruous as the custom is to higher culture, it finds natural suggestion in the everyday habits of the tribe, who are wonted not only to the eating of animal entrails in raw and uncleaned condition, but especially to the relief of the sharpest pangs of hunger by means of the soft structures and their semiassimilated contents—an association of much influence in primitive thought. Concordantly with the custom and the faith grown out of it, the excreta in general take a prominent place in the Seri mind; the use of urine in ablution, etc., is little understood and may be passed over; but all bony feces—and it may be noted that the “sign” of the Seri more resembles that of wolves or snake-eating swine than that of men—following gorges of large quarry are customarily located and kept