was able to tell when he wrote, or have modified its bearing. In cases where they seem to contradict his authorities, the question is in place whether it is a rule that observations on Indians, after they have been for two or three hundred years in contact with white men, are more accurate as to what they were primarily than the accounts of those who saw them uncontaminated, even though their methods may not have been so closely trimmed to the scientific rule. In reading the rapid sketches of the characteristics of these people, we are struck by many suggestive points. Some force the thought that there is in the lowest of them something that tends to lift them above their usual level; some remind us how much alike are men, even in the most diverse conditions and places and ages; and some that the doctrine of evolution is not wholly a conception of civilized philosophy or the product of the thought of ages. How different from their usual life is that feeling that prompts the Central Californian Indians, who appear to be the old "diggers," and who live in bestial laziness, to such a regard for the woodpecker that they will not touch its property of stored acorns till they are driven to it by the extreme of hunger!
A remarkable contrast is afforded by two tribes living close to one another in New Mexico: the Apaches, who have a regular system of numeration, with a name for every number up to ten thousand; and the Comanches, who can not count further than their fingers or some other visible objects will carry them, and can not calculate at all.
The Indians of Zacatecas have a ceremony corresponding with that of the "blood-covenant," which is characteristic of the south Slavic nations in Europe, and is found among many Eastern and African peoples.
In the legend of the Indians of Mount Shasta, which describes the descent of man from a family of grizzly bears, who were somewhat different then from what they are at present, walking on their hind legs like men, talking, and carrying clubs in their fore-limbs; in the Aht myth, which traces man's descent from the essences or embryos residing in them which the animals left behind when they fled from the sight of two beings in the shape of men; and in other stories of origins, we have glimpses of a kind of primitive doctrine of evolution. There are also stories teaching an inverse evolution, or the doctrine of degeneracy, in the descent of beasts, fishes, and even edible roots from human originals. Most curious is the Mexican doctrine of the future state and the wanderings of the spirit, which, except that the journey is briefer and the perils are correspondingly less numerous, might have been extracted from the Egyptian "Book of the Dead."
On this subject, and respecting the languages of these people, after having presented and compared them, the author says: "He who carefully examines the myths and languages of the aboriginal nations of the Pacific States can not fail to be impressed with the similarity between them and the beliefs and tongues of mankind elsewhere. Here
