GOLDS. A people of the Lower Amur and the Usuri, in Southeastern Siberia, belonging, physi cally and linguistically, to the Tungusic group of Siberian peoples. Deniker (1900) describes them as "of a very pure type, and having a fairly well developed ornamental art." Laufer, who visited them in 1898-99, notes the great in fluence of Chinese symbolism and ornamental motifs upon the •art products of the Golds; the dragon and the cock seem to have been introduced thus. The Golds have a rich mythology (with many archaic words and phrases), a considerable portion of which has evidently originated in Mongolian Central Asia. From the Chinese some of the Golds have learned the art of silk-em broidery, in which they display great skill. Although fishers and hunters generally, a portion of them have taken to agriculture with not a little success. They are said to be losing of late years their individuality through the mania for Russian fashions, etc. Laufer informs us that
"a tendency to rationalism, due perhaps to con tinuous contact with Chinese culture, is one of the distinguishing traits of the Gold's character." It is to this 'preponderance of intellect' that Laufer attributes the absence of many ceremonies, feasts, etc., among the Golds, and the dying out of belief in the old shamans, whose place the Russian physician now takes. Marriages of Golds and Chinese are said to be often infertile. A primitive people, under the influence of such differing cultures as the Chinese and the Rus sian, the Golds are of considerable ethnological importance. The best recent account of the Golds and other tribes of the Amur will be found in Schrenck, "Die Volker des Amurlandes," vol. iii. of his Forschungen in Amurland, (Saint Petersburg, ; and Laufer, "The Amoor Tribes," in the American Anthropologist (New York) for 1900.