325 
T have heard and seen similar things, and had them related to me by the 
Indians themselves. We could not help feeling, I think, as we listened to 
this paper, that it is amongst the Indians, as it was amongst the Greeks 
and Romans and others in old times, that ‘“ they had gods many, and lords 
many.” Both the Old and the New World are alike in this; and this 
helps to prove the identity of the race. There is among the Indians, so far 
as I have seen, no little confusion about their gods; and it is not surprising, 
for they have no written books, and what comes down by tradition may 
become confused. I was much interested in what is stated in the paper 
-about the Manitous. Livery tribe of Indians I know has a Manitou. But 
many of them make no distinction between their Great Spirit and 
Manitou. They are both one. The Ojibway tribe, which is, perhaps, 
the most intelligent in British North America, and the most widely 
spread, all look up io Manitou as the Great Spirit, and the Great Spirit is 
their Manitou. I was greatly struck with one statement in the paper, but I 
cannot find fault with it, because the beliefs of the Indians vary so much, 
But the idea seemed to be thrown out that they do not offer sacrifices to 
Manitou. Well, some may not, but others do, For instance, some of 
the Ojibways do. They try to propitiate, by offering prayers and sacrifices 
to Manitou. An Indian informed me that his father used to travel a long 
way and make sacrifices when he had done anything wrong, to propitiate 
Manitou. They will go up a very high hill, to an almost inaccessible 
place, and there deposit something precious to them. To part with that 
something, and take it up a high hill, and deposit it in the cleft of a rock, 
is their sacrifice. Perhaps what was most precious to them was a plug of 
tobacco. I have known an Indian travel many miles to the Falls of 
Niagara, and there take out a plug of tobacco and throw it into the 
Falls, and comfort himself saying, ‘‘ There now, Manitou will have a good 
smoke to-night!” (Laughter.) That could be nothing but propitiation. 
With regard to the traditions about the Flood, I agree with the writer that 
we must take them cwm grano salis, They have, no doubt, real traditions 
of the Flood, as they have of the Creation and of the Fall of man, which, - 
I think, is not mentioned in the paper; but they have occasional floods 
in the north-west of America, and they are very terrible. Sometimes 
they carry houses with them, boats drift away, the. crews are quite lost, 
and find themselves in places in which they had never been before; and a 
good many of these traditions about the waters coming down this, that, and 
the other valley arise from occurrences such as I have described. I 
remember Bishop Anderson, who still lives at Clifton, giving me a descrip- 
tion of a flood in the north-west while he was there, and he has written an 
account of it. There is a thrilling novel, written, I think, by Ballantyne, 
called “The Red Man’s Revenge,” and published in The Boy's Own 
Paper by the Religious Tract Society, which gives about as good a, picture 
as can be of a similar flood in the north-west of America. But, drop all 
this, and yet there remains an aggregation of evidences of a tradition of 
what could be nothing else but Noah’s flood, some of them wonderfully 
