232 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



tion, 1 we cannot help thinking of the common practice 

 of burying children in their mother's hut, and of the 

 analogous measures of the Hurons and Musquakie to 

 obtain a return of the departed infant ; and we ask 

 whether the affection entertained by the Botocudo 

 mother did not centre in the hope that by eating the 

 body of the child she would get it back again in a new 

 birth. 



The North American tribes, less oppressed by 

 external nature, had reached a higher plane of culture 

 than the Botocudos. Long before the seventeenth 

 century, when their doings are first recorded, the 

 Hurons had abandoned such crude means of recover- 

 ing their children, if they had ever made use of them. 

 They and the other Indians of the plains and the 

 Atlantic shores had arrived at a conception of per- 

 sonality based upon a subtler identity. It was this 

 identity which they strove to retain in ways exemplified 

 above, not only by Huron and Musquakie practices 

 but also by those of the Tacullies. Their view of 

 life was thus much nearer to metempsychosis, though 

 metamorphosis was not wholly outgrown : it had 

 still its place in their philosophy. We have observed 

 the same phenomenon in the Old World ; it has 

 been frequently illustrated in the preceding pages. 

 The Danikil on the southern shore of the lower end 

 of the Red Sea hold in spite of Islam that the souls, 

 especially of their sorcerers and priests, seek new 

 bodies, and that those who are most active in assistance 

 ^during the last few days or hours of a dying sorcerer 

 receive his powerful spirit in their first male offspring. 

 Accordingly there is a busy coming and going 

 1 Featherman, Chiapo-Mar. 355. 



