Then the corps is brought out of the house into the orchard
of peach trees, where another hurdle is made to receive it,
about which comes all the relations and nation that the dead
person belonged to, besides several from other nations in
alliance with them; all which sit down on the ground upon
mats spread there for that purpose.[37]

NETS.

The manufacture and use of nets by natives in various parts of the
country are recorded by early writers, some of whom have already been
quoted. Speaking of the Iroquois De la Potherie says:

The old men and those who can not or do not wish to go to war
or the chase, make nets and are fishers. This is a plebian
trade among them. Their nets are made of thread of nettles or
of white wood, the bark of which they make into thread by
means of lye which renders it strong and pliable.[38]

In another place the same author says:

The Sauteurs, who are beyond the Missisakis, take their name
from a Saut (waterfall) which flows from Lake Superior into
Lake Huron by a great fall whose rapids are extremely
violent. These people are very skillful in fishery by which
they obtain white fish as large as salmons. They cross all
these terrible rapids into which they cast a net like a sack,
a little more than half an ell in width by one in depth
attached to a forked stick about 15 feet long.[39]

A novel use of nets is recorded by this author as follows:

For taking pigeons in summer in nets, they make a broad path
in the woods and attach to two trees, one on each side, a
large net made in the shape of a sack well opened.[40]

Du Pratz, speaking of the fishing nets of the Louisiana Indians, states
that they "are meshed like ours and made of lime-tree bark; the large
fish are shot with arrows."[41]

FEATHER WORK.

Feather work was one of the most remarkable arts of the natives of
Mexico and other southern countries at the period of the conquest. The
feathers were sometimes woven in with the woof and sometimes applied to
a network base after the fashion of embroidery. Rarely, it may be
imagined, were either spun or unspun fabrics woven of feathers alone.
Very pleasing specimens of ancient Peruvian feather work are recovered
from graves at Ancon and elsewhere, and the method of inserting the
feathers is illustrated in the Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of
Ethnology.[42] In few instances has such work b