A NEW FIELD OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 373 



was able to tell when he wrote, or have modified its bearing. In cases 

 where they seem to contradict his authorities, the question is in place 

 whether it is a rule that observations on Indians, after they have been 

 for two or three hundred years in contact with white men, are more 

 accurate as to what they were primarily than the accounts of those 

 who saw them uncontaminated, even though their methods may not 

 have been so closely trimmed to the scientific rule. In reading the 

 rapid sketches of the characteristics of these people, we are struck by 

 many suggestive points. Some force the thought that there is in the 

 lowest of them something that tends to lift them above their usual 

 level ; some remind us how much alike are men, even in the most 

 diverse conditions and places and ages ; and some that the doctrine of 

 evolution is not wholly a conception of civilized philosophy or the 

 product of the thought of ages. How different from their usual life 

 is that feeling that prompts the Central Californian Indians, who ap- 

 pear to be the old " diggers," and who live in bestial laziness, to such 

 a regard for the woodpecker that they will not touch its property of 

 stored acorns till they are driven to it by the extreme of hunger ! 



A remarkable contrast is afforded by two tribes living close to one 

 another in New Mexico : the Apaches, who have a regular system of 

 numeration, with a name for every number up to ten thousand ; and 

 the Comanches, who can not count further than their fingers or some 

 other visible objects will carry them, and can not calculate at all. 



The Indians of Zacatecas have a ceremony corresponding with that 

 of the " blood-covenant," which is characteristic of the south Slavic 

 nations in Europe, and is found among many Eastern and African 

 peoples. 



In the legend of the Indians of Mount Shasta, which describes the 

 descent of man from a family of grizzly bears, who were somewhat 

 different then from what they are at present, walking on their hind- 

 legs like man, talking, and carrying clubs in their fore-limbs ; in the 

 Aht myth, which traces man's descent from the essences or embryos 

 residing in them which the animals left behind when they fled from 

 the sight of two beings in the shape of men ; and in other stories of 

 origins, we have glimpses of a kind of primitive doctrine of evolution. 

 There are also stories teaching an inverse evolution, or the doctrine 

 of degeneracy, in the descent of beasts, fishes, and even edible roots 

 from human originals. Most curious is the Mexican doctrine of the 

 future state and the wanderings of the spirit, which, except that the 

 journey is briefer and the perils are correspondingly less numerous, 

 might have been extracted from the Egyptian " Book of the Dead." 



On this subject, and respecting the languages of these people, after 

 having presented and compared them, the author says : "He who 

 carefully examines the myths and languages of the aboriginal nations 

 of the Pacific States can not fail to be impressed with the similarity 

 between them and the beliefs and tongrues of mankind elsewhere. Here 



