428 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



code, no hereditary chiefs, nothing but custom and a strong sense 

 of duty, or national spirit, in virtue of which the tribal groups act 

 voluntarily in concert, come together and elect their temporary 

 toqiti (dictator) in time of war, and the danger over, disperse 

 again to their isolated homes and farmsteads, for they lack 

 even sufficient cohesion to dwell together in small village 

 communities. 



There was, however, one controlling or binding force, a kind 

 of ancestry worship, or at least a profound veneration for their 

 forefathers, who after death went to people the Milky Way, and 

 from that vantage-ground continued to watch over the conduct 

 of their children. And this simple belief is almost the only 

 substitute for the rewards and punishments which supply the 

 motive for the observance of an artificial ethical code in so many 

 more developed religious systems. 



In the sonorous Araucanian language, which is still spoken by 

 about 40,000 full-blood natives, the term che, meaning " people," 

 occurs as the postfix of several ethnical groups, which, however, 

 are not tribal but purely territorial divisions. Thus, while Molit- 

 che is the collective name of the whole nation, the Picun-che, 

 Huilli-che, and Puel-che are simply the North, South, and East 

 men respectively. The Central and most numerous division are 

 the Pehuen-che^ that is, people of the Pehuen district, who are both 

 the most typical and most intelligent of all the Araucanian family. 

 Ehrenreich's remark that many of the American aborigines re- 

 semble Europeans as much as or even more than the Asiatic 

 Mongols, is certainly borne out by the facial expression of these 

 Pehuen-ches. The resemblance is even extended to the mental 

 characters, as reflected in their oral literature. Amongst the 

 specimens of the national folklore preserved in the Pehuen-che 

 dialect and edited with Spanish translations by Dr Rodolfo Lenz 1 , 

 is the story of a departed lover, who returns from the other world 

 to demand his betrothed and carries her off to his grave. Al- 

 though this might seem an adaptation of Burger's Lenore, Dr Lenz 

 is of opinion that it is a genuine Araucanian legend. 



Of the above-mentioned groups the Puel-ches are now included 



1 In the Anales de la Universidad de Chile for 1897. 



