222 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



among them." * Here Sir John Lubbock plainly means to teach, 

 on the authority of Caillie, that the Foulahs were not even fetich- 

 worshipers; that they were positively without any religion of 

 their own. But if he had read Caillie more carefully read the 

 context as well as the text he would have discovered that the 

 Foulahs and kindred tribes were idolaters ; for that well-known 

 explorer goes on to say : " Wassoula is a country inhabited by 

 idolatrous Foulahs ; they carry on little traffic, and never travel ; 

 their idolatry would indeed expose them to the most dreadful 

 slavery if they did. . . . They have each several wives, like all 

 other idolaters." It is plain that Caillie here makes a distinction 

 between higher forms of worship and the grosser worship of 

 images. He sought for the higher form of worship, and found 

 no trace of it, but he evidently found the grosser form, or evi- 

 dence of it. And it was this grosser form of idolatry that made 

 it dangerous for the Foulahs to travel outside of their limits ; for, 

 if they had done so, they would have come into contact with 

 Mohammedanism, pledged to the extirpation of idolatry, and in 

 many countries to the enslavement of persistent idolaters. 



The same lack of thoroughness in quotation is noticeable in 

 Lubbock's treatment of the testimony of Bates as to the Brazilian 

 Indians. He says, " According to Bates, ' none of the tribes on 

 the upper Amazons have an idea of a Supreme Being, and conse- 

 quently have no word to express it in their language."' This 

 quotation is perfectly correct, but it does not imply what Sir 

 John Lubbock is seeking to prove namely, that " almost all the 

 savage tribes are entirely without a religion." It simply affirms 

 that Brazilian Indians do not believe in a Supreme Being an 

 affirmation that might fairly be made with reference to many 

 tribes whose beliefs are very apparent. But in no sense can 

 Bates be quoted as a witness to the absence of religious belief 

 among Brazilian Indians; his testimony runs in the opposite 

 direction. " The mind of the Indian," he writes, " is in a very 

 primitive condition. He has no idea of a 'Supreme Being, but at 

 the same time he is free from revolting superstitions, his re- 

 ligious notions going no further than belief in an evil spirit, re- 

 garded merely as a kind of hobgoblin who is at the bottom of all 

 his failures in fishing, hunting, and so forth." f In this testimony 

 the word "hobgoblin" depreciates in our minds the character of 

 this supernatural being, but few if any savages have such a word 

 in their mental vocabulary. Few if any evil spirits worshiped 

 by savages unite in them the clumsiness and trickery of a hob- 

 goblin ; their evil, awful spirits are terrors, entering into all as- 



* Travels to Timbuctoo, vol. i, p. 303. 



f Bates's Life in the Amazons, vol. ii, p. 137. 



