AS A TEST OF MENTAL CAPACITY. 87 



to those of the Pueblos, iu natural aptitude and taste, is equally apparent. With inferior 

 implements and under other disadvantages, they do equal or even better work.' In a 

 letter with which Dr. Matthews has recently favoured me, he writes of this people: 

 "Their own traditions and the works of early travellers show that they have made great 

 advances in the last two or three centuries. This is partly due, no doubt, to contact 

 with Pueblos and whites, and partly to admixture of the blood of these races ; but it 

 must be largely attributed to some innate docility of the Navajo stock. Many of the wild 

 tribes of these parts have had exactly the same advantages, and yet have not advanced as the 

 Navajos have done. Their silversmiths have, without any instruction, greatly improved 

 their art within the last six years. They have discovered for themselves methods of 

 ornamenting in repousse and by means of dies. Their weavers have invented some import- 

 ant improvements. Navajo progress forms a subject of great interest, and its causes are 

 not easy to determine. They would probably have earlier become dwellers iu permanent 

 houses but for their superstitious notions, which constrain them to abandon a house 

 where a death has occurred. Quite recently some of the less conservative have renounced 

 these notions, and built themselves houses of stone." 



But the intellectual powers of this remarkable people are displayed by evidences of 

 a far higher cast than works of agricirltiire and mechanic arts. Their literary. composi- 

 tions, as they may justly be called, their religious and legendary chants, evince vivid 

 imagination, a talent for clear and forcible expression, and a capacity for sustained and 

 impressive narration, which no barbarous and few civilized races have surpassed. Our 

 knowledge of those compositions is due also to the same discerning and indefatigable 

 investigator. " The Prayer of a Navajo Shaman," which Dr. Matthews has preserved for 

 us (in the ' American Anthropologist' for April, 1888), is not so much a prayer as the rela- 

 tion of an intensely interesting religious or mythological experience. It is the story of a 

 descent into the underworld for the recovery, not of a lost soul, but of a stolen " .spiritual 

 body," which had been carried off by the chief of witches for the purpose of working woe 

 to the visible body and to the soul of the rightful possessor, remaining on the earth. In 

 answer to his supplication the two principal war-gods of the Navajo pantheon come from 

 their abodes on the summits of the neighboring mountains, and descend into the lower 

 regions, passing gate after gate, which, though guarded by direful sentinels, yield before 

 their magic wands. In the lowest depths they recover the fragments of the lost body, 

 which resume their proper form, and the three return upward, through chamber after 

 chamber, until the suppliant reaches his home, when his spirit, body, and soul are reunited, 

 and " the world around him is restored iu beauty." This is but a feeble outline of a compo- 

 sition which when read is most impressive. In all the legendary lore which the Assyrian 

 tablets have yielded to modern explorers there are few more interesting stories than that 

 of the descent of the goddess Ishtar into Hades, to confront the awful queen of that 

 realm, and recover (as is supposed) her lost lover Thammuz, and of her restoration to the 

 upper world.- The incidents bear, in certain respects, a very curious resemblance to those 

 of the Navajo legend. But as compositions, and viewed merely as displays of literary 



' " Navajo Silversmiths," by Washington Matthews, in the second annual ' Report of the Bureau of Ethnol- 

 ogy,' p. 171. 



- See Rawlinson's " Relif^ion.s of tlie Ancient World," chap, l', referring to Fox Talbot, " Records of the i'ast," 

 pp. 143-149. 



