254< TRAVELS IN BRAZIL. 



many persons as not originally Indian, but, as well 

 as the idea of God itself in opposition to the de- 

 moniacal principle, the devil, was first communicated 

 to the Indians by the missionaries. In general, as 

 they are wholly destitute of all religious notions, 

 and all ideas of revelation, all the terms appropriate 

 to those subjects must be taken from the language 

 of the missionaries, or new made according to the 

 analogy of the Indian language. 



Even the denominations of objects that are within 

 the reach of their senses, are sometimes so remote 

 from them, that it is difficult to get them from them. 

 For instance, if w^e wish to learn from an Indian 

 the word earth, we must first point to the water, 

 and then, as a contrast to it, stamp on the ground, 

 in order to give him a striking notion of the mean- 

 ing of the question. To the question, what the 

 air is called, though we very frequently repeated 

 it, and took the greatest pains to make it intelli- 

 gible to them, no Indian ever gave us an answer, 

 though they would tell us how the wind was called. 

 For light, they point to the sun by day or to the 

 fire on the hearth. Of substantives, they have, at 

 most, only the names of concrete objects, such as 

 mountain, valley, forest, water, river, &c. It may 

 easUy be conceived that they want terms for ob- 

 jects, with which they have been made acquainted 

 by the Portuguese, for instance, king, general, 

 white man, table, chair, hat, handkerchief, glass, 

 clothes, horse, ox, sheep, pig, &c. By degrees they 



