Note 331 — Chapter IV
Reading edition
Footnote 331
:
(return)
Henry R. Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois (Albany, 1847), p. 137. Schoolcraft did not know the date of the ceremony, but he conjectured that it fell at the end of the Iroquois year, which was a lunar year of twelve or thirteen months. He says: "That the close of the lunar series should have been the period of putting out the fire, and the beginning of the next, the time of relumination, from new fire, is so consonant to analogy in the tropical tribes, as to be probable" (op. cit. p. 138).