MALLERY.] SHAMANISM. 491 
“medicine man” of current literature and the indefinite title “priest,” 
the associations with which are not appropriate to the Indian religious 
practitioner. The statement that the Indians worship, or ever have 
worshiped, one “Great Spirit” or single overruling personal god is 
erroneous. That philosophical conception is beyond the stage of culture 
reached by them, and was not found in any tribe previous to missionary 
influence. Their actual philosophy can be expressed far more objec- 
tively and therefore pictorially. 
The special feature of the notes now collected under the present head- 
ing relates to the claims and practices of shamans, but the immediately 
succeeding headings of “Charms and Amulets” and of ‘ Religious 
Ceremonies” are closely connected with the same topic. It must be 
confessed that, as now presented, they have been arranged chiefly for 
mechanical convenience, to which convenience also in other parts of the 
present work scientific discrimination has sometimes been forced to 
yield without, it is hoped, much injury. Individual intercomparison, 
with or without cross references, is besought from any critical reader 
of this paper. 
Feats of jugglery or pretended magic rivaling or surpassing the best 
of spiritualistic séances have been recounted to the present writer in 
many places by independent and intelligent Indian witnesses, not 
operators, generally of advanced age. The cumulated evidence gives 
an opportunity for spiritualists to argue for the genuineness of their 
own manifestations or manipulations as, in accordance with the degree 
of credence, they may be styled. Others will contend that these remark- 
able performances in which this hemisphere was rich before the Colum- 
bian discovery—the occidental rivaling the oriental Indians—belong 
to a culture stage below civilization. They will observe that the age 
of miracles among barbaric people has not expired, and that it still 
exists among outwardly civilized persons who are yet subject to super- 
stition in its true etymologic sense of ‘“‘remaining over from the past.” 
The most elaborate and interesting of these stories which are known 
relate to a time about forty years ago, shortly before the Davenport 
brothers and the Fox sisters had excited interest mm the civilized por- 
tions of the United States; but exhibitions of a magic character are 
still given among the tribes, though secretly, from fear of the Indian 
agents and missionaries. It is an important fact that the first French 
missionaries in Canada and the early settlers of New England described 
substautially the same performances when they first met the Indians, 
all of whom belonged to the Algonquian or Iroquoian stocks. So 
remarkable and frequent were these performances of jugglery that the 
French, in 1613, called the whole body of Indians on the Ottawa River, 
whom they met at a very early period, ‘‘The Sorcerers.” They were the 
tribes afterwards called Nipissing, and were the typical Algonquians. 
No suspicion of prestidigitation or other form of charlatanry appears 
to have been entertained by any of the earliest French and English 
