Similar conditions have existed from time to time during the history of the Hopi, when new clans were added to those already existing. For many years incoming clans maintained a strict taboo, and each family held the secrets of its own religion; but as time went on and assimilation resulted by intermarriage, the religious society arose, composed of men and women of different clans. The family to which a majority of the membership belonged continued to hold the chieftaincy, and owned the altar and its paraphernalia, cherishing the legends of the society. But when men of other clans were admitted to membership, a mutual reaction of one society on another naturally resulted. This tended to modifications which have obscured the original character of distinctive family worship. The problem of the Hopi ritual, by which is meant the sum of all great ceremonies in the Hopi calendar, deals largely with a composite system. It implies, as elsewhere pointed out, an investigation of the characteristic religious observances of several large families which formerly lived apart in different pueblos. It necessitates a knowledge of the social composition of Walpi and of the history of the different phratries which make up the population of the village. There is a corollary to the above conclusions. No pueblo in the southwest, outside of Tusayan, has the same ceremonial calendar as Walpi, because the population of none is made up of the same clans united in the same relative proportions. Hence the old remark that what is true of one pueblo is true of all, does not apply to their ritual. Some ceremonies at Jemez, Acoma, Sia, and Zuñi, for instance, are like some ceremonies at Walpi; but the old ceremonial calendar in any one of these pueblos was different from that of the other, because the component families were not the same. In the same way the ceremonies at Hano and Walpi have certain things in common, due no doubt to the assimilation in the latter of certain Tanoan clans, but their calendars are very different. The _Tûñtai_ at Hano differs more widely from the Winter Solstice ceremony at Walpi, a gunshot away, than the Walpi observance differs from that at Oraibi, twenty miles distant. So we might also predict that if we knew the character of Winter Solstice altars in the Rio Grande Tewa villages, they would be found to resemble those of Hano more closely than the altars of Hano resemble those of Walpi. The Knickerbocker Press, New York FOOTNOTES: [1] _The Winter Solstice Ceremony at Walpi_ (_American Anthropologist_, vol. XI). [2] These studies were made under the auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology. [3] Most of the people of Sitcomovi are of the _Asa_ and _Honani_ clans, of Tanoan ancestry, but they long ago lost the Tewa language and their Tanoan identity.