“Why do you paint your face?” we asked a visiting Santa Domingo dandy. “Oh, to be na-ice,” he replied to our impertinence. “Why don’t you paint yours?” Volumes have been written of the Pueblo Indians’ folklore and religion, much of it probably wrong, for the Indian has a habit of telling what he thinks you want to be told, and concealing exactly what he wishes to conceal. His religion is too sacred and intimate to be revealed to the first inquirer. While he has a sense of humor, which some people persist in denying, he is, like most practical jokers, extremely sensitive to ridicule, especially when directed against himself. Always a mystic, he finds his way easily where the Anglo-Saxon gropes. The common lore of Strange Things, which he shares with the gypsy, the Hindu, and the Jew, races to whom he bears a certain physical resemblance, was his centuries before he adopted clothes. In ordinary learning he remains a child, albeit a shrewd child, yet his eyes are open in realms of the unknown. He hears the rush of mighty winds through the heavens, and is acquainted with the voice of the thunder. He can commune with unseen forces without the trumpery aid of ouija or the creaky mechanism of science. Though he can barely add and hardly knows his multiplication tables, I venture to guess that if the fourth dimension be ever demonstrated, the Indian will be found to have had a working knowledge of it, and will accept it as a commonplace to his tribe and his medicine men. In the Casa Grande ruins is a tiny hole through which the sun shines the first day it crosses the vernal equinox. Like the lens of a telescope, this focusses into other tiny holes in other parts of the building. Why it is there nobody knows, but it indicates a knowledge of astronomy which places the prehistoric Pima on equal footing with modern scientists. Before the Zûni Indians knew a white race existed, according to Cushing, Powell and the musician Carlos Troyer, they had evolved the theory of prismatic rays coming from the sun, and had established a fixed relation between color and sound tones, anticipating by some centuries Mr. Henderson and others. Their medicine men took shells, found in their magic Corn Mountain, a giant mesa overshadowing the village, polished them to tissue thinness, and then painted each shell a pure color, corresponding to the colors of the prism. One by one they placed these shells over the ear, nearest the sun. The corresponding color ray from the sun would strike a musical note so powerful that care had to be taken to prevent the ear drum being broken. These absolute color-tones the medicine men noted, and used exclusively in sacred ceremonies, but did not permit their use in secular music. Are the red men more subtly attuned to rhythms of the universe than the superior white race? Has the dirty, half-naked medicine-man somehow found the parent stem of the banyan-tree of life, while we are still digging around its off-shoots?