REDMEN ; SOME OF THEIR THOUGHTS. 1. 5 
and thus indeed essential to his very being, is natural; 
nor in this stage of civilization has he had opportunity 
of observing the other mental qualities, which are indeed 
their, rather, undeveloped mental potentialities. Strange 
men, wild beasts, rocks and trees in falling, rivers by 
drowning, diseases always imagined in bodily forms, 
and the countless other recognized beings ever seem to 
surround the Redmen, ready to infli6t injury by, and 
only by the one-known weapon, cunning. Bodily size 
and strength are in themselves of no account, I have 
known a whole village of some two hundred Redmen 
thrown into consternation for some days by the appear- 
ance in their neighbourhood of one small bird, no bigger 
ithan a sky-lark, in which, in some way unknown to me, 
.they recognized the presence of a hostile spirit, powerful 
in cunning. This dread is less surprising when it is 
remembered that to these primitive thinkers it seems 
that each, sooner or later, meets and falls before his 
superior in cunning ; for when the death which comes to 
each befalls, it is either by violence, in which case it is 
manifestly the work of a being of superior cunning; or 
it is by disease — and this, too, is the work of some cun- 
ning spirit, which has entered into its vi6lim in the 
insignificant bodily form, so hard to guard against, of, 
as often as not, a fly or worm. ••.-•;, y 
It is for this reason that the Redman, feeling his own 
inability in many cases to circumvent the never-ending, 
most insidious attacks of these more cunning beings, 
who are to him murderers — or, to use his own 
word, kenaimas — ever on the watch to slay, employs 
the most cunning of his own fellows, who has been 
deliberately educated in cunning as a peaiman, or 
