PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 179 



their own ancestor, founder of their religious rites, and ruler of 

 the weather, while the coyote was the parent and benefactor of 

 the Karoks and other Californians. The rattlesnake was a gen- 

 eral " grandfather," and, though greatly feared, was, it is said, 

 never intentionally killed. Some authors have asserted that fet- 

 ichism is not found in American religions, but that would only be 

 true with a narrow definition of fetichism, which is but one form 

 of animism, and should include all attribution of voluntary power 

 to inanimate objects, not, as are idols, representative or symbolic, 

 which is as prominent a feature in Indian as in African mythol- 

 ogy. Even the most repulsive fetichistic details survive in what 

 has, foolishly enough, been translated " medicine," embracing 

 charms and amulets, the fossil tooth carried by the Assiniboin, 

 the tail feathers of the chapparal cock sacred among the Chey- 

 €Mnes, stones with vivid spots, colored earth or sand, bones and 

 ashes of animals, birds and reptiles, deposited in bags with cere- 

 monial chants and dances, and possessing as used deadly or 

 saving virtues. We find here, in short, with new faces, most of 

 the antique foes of Christianity, e. g. Antientism, hero and astral 

 worship — sometimes mingled, as when an Iroquois tribe revered 

 loskeha, born of a virgin daughter of the moon, as its father 

 and bestower of fire — metempsychosis of man and beast, appa- 

 ritions and sorcery, oracle and disease-possession by good and 

 bad spirits, and the eastern psychopomp has its analogue in the 

 dog slain, or the bird loosed at the grave. Our Indians, so long 

 secluded and delayed in their sociological culture, were on their 

 discovery no better and no worse, religiously, than the population 

 of what it is the fashion to call Juventus inundi. Referring 

 then to Mr. Catlin's pathetic lament, if all the members of their 

 polytheism, or rather polydai monism, had been addressed on 

 any day by each native inhabitant of the continent, the list of 

 prayers would have far exceeded his sixteen millions, but the 

 multiplication would have been produced by the census of the 

 divinities as a factor quite as important as that of their wor- 

 shippers. 



This leads us to consider the common belief that the native 

 population on the arrival of the first colonists was very large, has 

 been and still is rapidly becoming e.xtinct, and that the ca'use of 

 that extinction is an inherent characteristic or defect of the race 

 rendering impossible its civilization or even existence with civil- 

 ized environments. 



< TAe part of Ihe paper under this head will he published in the Proceedings of 



the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nashville 



Meeting. 1877.) 



The conclusions reached are, that the pre-Columbian popula- 

 tion of the territory occupied by the United States has been wildly 

 overestimated ; that, while many of its component bodies have 



