78 
toner's address. 
his remedies and modes of practice, are mentioned, 
but no allusion is made to the priest. And quite often 
the declaration is distinctly made by travelers, that 
particular peoples and tribes had no religious obser- 
vances or priests, and no belief in God, or even a word 
in their language that would express the idea of a 
Creator and Supreme Ruler of the Universe. 
In confirmation of this I shall only refer to the 
testimony of two, that of Rev. Father Baegert, a Jesuit 
missionary who lived among the Lower California 
Indians for seventeen years, dating from 175 1, and 
that of Rev. Father Lewis Hennepin. I quote from 
a translation of Father Baegert's work, as published in 
the Smithsonian Report for 1864, p. 390."^ In speak- 
ing of the California Indians, he says: ''They had no 
magistrates, no police, and no laws ; idols, temples, 
and religious worship or ceremonies were unknown 
to them, and they neither believed in the true and 
only God, nor adored false deities." 
As fully corroborative of this statement Father 
Hennepin, at page 58 of the Continuation of the New 
Discovery of a Vast Country in America, says : '* I 
cannot tell whether their [the Indians'] predecessors 
have been acquainted with any deity or not, but sure 
I am that their language, which is otherwise very ex- 
Charles Rau, translator, says : According to Father Piccolo, the Cal- 
ifornians worshiped the moon, and Venegas mentions the belief in a 
good and bad principle as prevailing among the Pericues and Cotchi- 
mies." (W^aitz's Anthropologic der Naturvolker,vol. iv., p. 250.) These 
statements are emphatically refuted by the Rev. Mr. Baegert in his 
first Appendix, p. 315, where he says : It is not true that they wor- 
shiped the moon, or practiced any kind of idolatry." 
