The Seri Indians appear to recognize a wide variety of mystical potencies and a number of zoic deities, all of rather limited powers. The Pelican, Turtle, Moon, and Sun seem to lead their thearchy. Creation is ascribed to the Ancient of Pelicans—a mythical bird of marvelous wisdom and melodious song—who first raised Isla Tassne, and afterward Tiburon and the rest of the world, above the primeval waters. Individual fetishes are used, and there is some annual ceremony at the time of ripening of cactus fruits, and certain observances at the time of the new moon. The most conspicuous ceremony is the girls’ puberty feast. The dead are clothed in their finest raiment, folded and fastened in small compass like Peruvian mummies, placed in shallow graves, and covered with turtle-shells, when the graves are filled with earth and heaped with stones or thorny brambles for protection against beasts of prey. Fetishes, weapons, and other personal belongings are buried with the body, as well as a dish of food and an olla of water, and there are curious customs connected with the place of sepulture. There is a weird, formal mourning for dead matrons, and suggestions of fear of or veneration for the manes. Seriland is surrounded with prehistoric works, telling of a numerous population who successfully controlled the scant waters for irrigation, built villages and temples and fortresses, cultivated crops, kept domestic animals, and manufactured superior fictile and textile wares; but (save possibly in one spot) these records of aboriginal culture cease at the borders of Seriland. In their stead a few slightly worn pebbles and bits of pottery are found here and there, deeply embedded in the soil and weathered as by the suns of ages. There are also a few cairns of cobbles marking the burial places, and at least one cobble mound of striking dimensions but of unknown meaning; and there are a few shell-mounds, one so broad and high as to form a cape in the slowly transgressing shoreline (Punta Antigualla), and in which the protolithic implements and other relics are alike from the house-dotted surface to the tide level, 90 feet below. The absence of relics of a superior culture, and the presence of Seri relics throughout deposits of high antiquity, suggest that the tribe is indigenous to Seriland; and this indication harmonizes with the peculiar isolation of the territory, the lowly culture and warlike habits of the people, the essentially distinct language, the singular marriage custom, and the local character of the beast-gods. And all these features combine to mark the Seri as children of the soil, or autochthones. RECENT EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS