26 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



from the value of the thing presented. Describing people who carry- 

 burdens over the high passes, he speaks of them as unloading them- 

 selves on the top, and then severally saying to the god Pachacamac : 



" 'I give thanks that this has heen carried,' and in making an offering they 

 pulled a hair out of their eyehrows, or took the herb called cuca from their 

 mouths, as a gift of the most precious things they had. Or, if there was nothing 

 better, they offered a small stick or piece of straw, or even a piece of stone or 

 earth. There were great heaps of these offerings at the summits of passes over 

 the mountains." 



Though, coming to us in this unfamiliar form, these offerings of parts 

 of themselves, or of things they prized, or else of worthless things, seem 

 strange, they will seem less strange on remembering that at the foot of 

 a way-side crucifix in France may any day be seen a heap of small 

 crosses severally made of two bits of lath nailed together. Intrinsically 

 of no more value than these straws, sticks, and stones, the Peruvians 

 offered, they similarly force on our attention the truth that the act of 

 presentation passes into a ceremony expressing the wish to conciliate. 

 How natural is this substitution of a nominal giving for a real giving, 

 where real giving is impracticable, we are shown even by intelligent 

 animals. A retriever, accustomed to please his master by fetching 

 killed birds, etc., will fall into the habit at other times of fetching some- 

 thing to show his desire to please. On first seeing in the morning, or 

 after an absence, one he is friendly with, he will join, with the usual 

 demonstrations of joy, the seeking and bringing in his mouth a dead 

 leaf, a twig, or any small available object lying near. And this example, 

 while serving to show the natural genesis of this propitiatory ceremony, 

 serves also to show how deep down there begins the process of sjun- 

 bolization ; and how, at the outset, the symbolic act is as near a repe- 

 tition of the act symbolized as the circumstances allow. 



Prepared, as we thus are, to trace the development of gift -making 

 into a ceremony, let us now observe its several varieties, and the social 

 arrangements eventually derived from them. 



In headless tribes, and in tribes of which the headship is unsettled, 

 and in tribes of which the headship though settled is feeble, the making 

 of presents does not become an established usage. Australians, Tas- 

 manians, Fuegians, are instances; and on reading through accounts of 

 w T ild American races that are little organized, like the Esquimaux, 

 Chinooks, Snakes, Comanches, Chippewas, etc., or organized in a demo- 

 cratic manner, like the Iroquois and the Creeks, we find, along with 

 absence of strong personal rule, scarcely any mention of gift-making as 

 a political observance. 



In apt contrast come the descriptions of usages among those Amer- 

 ican races which in past times reached, under despotic governments, 

 considerable degrees of civilization. Torquemada tells us that in Mex- 



