, while
still on the loom the belt is endless. When all the warp has been
filled except about one foot, the weaving is completed; for then the
unfilled warp is cut in the center and becomes the terminal fringes of
the now finished belt.

The only marked difference that I have observed between the mechanical
appliances of the Navajo weaver and those of her Pueblo neighbor is to
be seen in the belt loom. The Zuni woman lays out her warp, not as a
continuous thread around two beams, but as several disunited threads.
She attaches one end of these to a fixed object, usually a rafter in
her dwelling, and the other to the belt she wears around her body. She
has a set of wooden healds by which she actuates the alternate threads
of the warp. Instead of using the slender stick of the Navajos to
elevate the threads of the warp in forming her figures, she lifts
these threads with her fingers. This is an easy matter with her
style of loom; but it would be a very difficult task with that of the
Navajos. Plate XXXVII represents a Zuni woman weaving a belt. The
wooden healds are shown, and again, enlarged, in Fig. 58. The Zuni
women weave all their long, narrow webs according to the same system;
but Mr. Bandelier has informed me that the Indians of the Pueblo of
Cochiti make the narrow garters and hair-bands after the manner of the
Zunis, and the broad belts after the manner of the Navajos.

[Illustration: PL. XXXVIII.--BRINGING DOWN THE BATTEN.]

[Illustration: FIG. 59.--Girl weaving (from an Aztec picture).]

Sec. XI. I will close by inviting the reader to compare Plate XXXVI and
Fig. 59. The former shows a Navajo woman weaving a belt; the latter a
girl of ancient Mexico weaving a web of some other description. The
one is from a photograph, taken from life; the other I have copied
from Tylor's "Anthropology" (p. 248); but it appears earlier in the
copy of Codex Vaticana in Lord Kingsborough's "Antiquities of Mexico."
The way in which the warp is held down and made tense, by a rope or
band secured to the lower beam and sat upon by the weaver, is the same
in both cases. And it seems that the artist who drew the original rude
sketch, sought to represent the girl, not as working "the cross-thread
of the woof in and out on a stick," but as manipulating the reed-fork
with one hand and grasping the heald-rod and shed-rod in the other.

NOTE.--The engravings were prepared while the author was in New
Mexico and could not be submitted