14 
beasts, as he learns to do at a later stage ; and he imagines himself of 
kin to the animals he sees, just as, when the wheel has gone full 
circle, the latest developments of highest science lead to the same 
result. An amusing incident is related by Schoolcraft, concern- 
ing a chief of the degraded Digger Indians, who told a traveller 
that the first Indians were coyotes, and when one of them died, 
his body became full of little animals or spirits, who took various 
shapes, but gradually, on the purely evolutionary method, 
developed into men. “ At first they walked on all fours, then 
they would begin to put forth an isolated human feature, one 
finger, one eye, like the Ascidian, our first parent in the view of 
modern science. Then they doubled their organs, got into the 
habit of sitting up, and wore away their tails, which they 
unaffectedly regret.”” A few old women of the tribe alone are so 
behindhand as to believe in the immortality of the soul; and 
thus we see that these lowest degraded savages are quite at one 
with the most advanced nineteenth-century ideas. 
In this rudimentary stage, man not only personifies the 
beasts as of kin to himself, but also treats inanimate objects in 
the same manner, especially those heavenly bodies whose motion 
he can see. Every barbarian nation thinks and speaks of the sun 
and moon as persons with the passions of men, and very strong 
sexual instincts. It is not long, probably, before the idea of the 
fetish is matured. Then a savage begins what we call worship 
of the fetish ; and here we must guard against confusion of ideas. 
Worship, to a savage, is a very different thing from what we call 
worship. A savage is not clear-headed enough to distinguish 
between facts and imaginations ; the phenomena of dreams in 
particular are real events to the savage. HExactness of statement, 
exactness of number, are impossibilities to a savage, who has 
even a deficiency of vocabulary ; and he could not tell you what 
his feelings exactly are with regard to the fetish he has made. 
We say that he worships it because we have no other word to 
express the act. It must be remembered that the observed 
motions of the sun, moon, and planets, and the course of the 
seasons, were really most inexplicable matters for many centuries. 
We cannot put ourselves in the position of men who have found 
no explanation for daily occurrences, although there are many 
puzzling phenomena still awaiting solution. Thus, many 
inexplicable noises are to be heard in primeval forests, which the 
natives declare to be the work of spirits; scientific observers do not 
believe that they are caused by spirits, but they can give no other 
explanation. Bates has described the mysterious sounds he has 
