256 FOSSIL MEN. 



perhaps from a natural confounding of the glorious and 

 world- enlivening orb of day with the Great Spirit 

 his maker, but in many nations taking the form of a 

 separate worship. Among the ancient Peruvians, and 

 possibly also among the Toltecans, this identification 

 of the sun-god with the Supreme Being seems to have 

 been complete. The Mexicans, however, had a separate 

 sun-god, Tezcatlipoca, and in this they agreed with 

 the Iroquois and Algonquins, whose sun-god was a 

 deified hero, the child of the great first mother. With 

 sun-worship was naturally connected fire-worship, and 

 it is interesting to observe that this, which seems to 

 have been the principal cultus of the Alleghans, or 

 extinct mound- builders of the west, and of the Natchez 

 and other southern tribes, had extended from them 

 to the Algonquin peoples of the north. A Chippewa 

 tribe, for example, inhabiting Kewenaw Point, one of 

 the former mining districts of the Alleghans, kept 

 up, according to Schoolcraft, a perpetual sacred fire in 

 a sort of hearth or open furnace. Its chief attendant 

 was the " Great Sun," or " Chief Sun," and one of its 

 priestesses was called the " Woman ever standing in 

 presence of the God," or as it has been quaintly 

 rendered, the " Everlasting standing woman," the 

 Pythoness of this western fire-god. This worship was 

 said to have been derived from the south, and it seems 

 to explain the altar-hearths of the mound-builders. 

 Among the Iroquois and Hurons the sun was in some 

 sense an emblem of their Ares or Mars, Areskoui or 

 Agreskoui, while the Mexicans had a separate war- 



