with the work found in the old cliff-dwellings, and its decoration is infantile as contrasted with the cliff-dwellers’ work.  The cliff-dwellers brought the art of decoration to a comparatively high state, as shown in the relics found in their dwellings.  But the cave-dweller of to-day shows no suggestion of such skill.  Moreover, he is utterly devoid of the architectural gift which resulted in the remarkable rock structures of the early cliff-dwellers.  These people as far as concerns their cave-dwelling habits cannot be ranked above troglodytes.

The Tarahumare never lives all his life in one house or cave; nor will he, on the other hand, leave it forever.  He rarely stays away from it for more than two or three years.  A family, after inhabiting a house for a time may suddenly decide to move it, even if it is built of stone.  The reason is not always easy to tell.  One man moved his house because he found that the sun did not strike it enough.  After a death has occurred in a dwelling, even though it was that of a distant relative incidentally staying with the family, the house is destroyed, or the cave permanently abandoned; and many other superstitious apprehensions of one kind or another may thus influence the people.  Very often a man moves for the sake of benefiting the land, and after tearing down his house he immediately plants corn on the spot on which the house stood.  A family may thus change its abode several times a year, or once a year, or every other year.  The richest man in the Tarahumare country, now dead, had five caves, and moved as often as ten times in one year.

A never absent feature of the Tarahumare habitation, be it house or cave, is a level, smooth place in front of it.  This is the dancing place, or patio, on which he performs his religious exercises, and he may have more than one.  The formation of the land may even oblige him to build terraces to obtain space enough for his religious dances.

On this patio, which measures generally about ten yards in every direction, one, two, or three crosses are planted, as the central object of all ceremonies (except those in the cult of the sacred cactus hikuli [3]).  The cross is generally about a foot high; sometimes it stands two feet above ground.  It is made of two sticks of unequal length, preferably sticks of pine wood, tied together in the form of the Latin cross.  I saw two crosses raised outside of a man’s house, which were formed by the natural growth of small pine trees, and these were four feet high.  The shamans, for their curing, use small crosses—­three or four inches long.

It is a well-known fact that on their arrival in America the Spaniards to their amazement found Indians in possession of the cross.  Omitting here the cross of Palenque, the symbol of a tree, the tree of life, it is safe to say that the original cross of most Mexican tribes is the Greek cross, though the Latin was also used.  To them the former is of fundamental religious moment, as indicating the four corners of the world; but a word for cross, or anything corresponding to it, does not occur in the language of any of the tribes known to me.  Nevertheless the cross (the Greek), to the Indian the symbol of a cosmic idea, is pecked on the rocks, or drawn on the sand, or made in corresponding strokes with medicine over the patient’s body.