CHAPTER V.

FIRE.

THE FIRE-USING ANIMAL—ESQUIMAUX USE OF FIRE—FUEGIAN FIRE-MAKING —MODES OF PRODUCING FIRE—AUSTRALIAN FIRE-MYTH—MEN OF THE MAMMOTH AGE—HEARTHS OF THE CAVE-MEN—PACIFIC ROOT-WORD FOR FIRE —GREAT CYCLE OF THE AZTECS—REKINDLING THE SACRED FIRE— PERUVIAN SUN-WORSHIPPERS—SACRIFICE OF THE WHITE DOG—SACRED FIRES OF THE MOUND-BUILDERS—INDIAN FIRE-MAKING—SANCTITY OF FIRE—TIERRA DEL FUEGO.

No incident attending the discovery of America is more suggestive than the evidence which first satisfied Columbus that his exploration of the mysterious western ocean had not been in vain. The sun had descended beneath the waves as his eye ranged along the horizon in search of the long expected land, when suddenly a light glimmered in the distance, once and again reappeared to the eyes of Pedro Gutierrez and others whom he summoned to confirm his vision, and then darkness and doubt resumed their reign. But to Columbus all was clear. Not only did those flitting gleams reveal to him certain signs of the long-wished-for land; they told him no less clearly that the land was inhabited by man.

There is something singularly significant in the old Greek myth which represents the Titanic son of Iapetus stealing the fire of Zeus that he might confer on the human race a power over the crude elements of nature. Man is peculiarly fire-using. The element which becomes in his hands a power that controls all the others, and subjects them to his use, is an object of dread to the lower animals, alike amid arctic snows and the shadows of a night-camp in the tropics. Its use, moreover, is so universal as to admit of its being regarded as one of the primitive instincts of man, and so peculiarly his own that he may be appropriately designated the _fire-using animal_. Nevertheless, his supposed ignorance of fire during primitive ages has been employed as an argument in confirmation of the idea that the first habitat of man must have been a climate where his unclothed body experienced no discomfort from the changing seasons, and where fruit was found in sufficient abundance to supply his wants without need of artificial preparation.[57]

Yet it is in climates where the torrid sun presents itself as the life-giving force that, alike in the old and the new world, the worship of fire, and the rites associated with its use, have been found most fully developed. It is noticeable, moreover, that fire is less used in the frigid than in the temperate zones as the direct source of heat. The Esquimaux in his snow-hut would find a fire productive only of discomfort. Even in the adaptation of animal food to his use cookery is less indispensable than in other latitudes; and fire is more prized by him in his brief summer as a protection against the myriads of noxious insects then warmed into life, than as a means of counteracting the rigour of a polar winter. He depends for warmth on his fur clothing, and still more on the heat-producing blubber and fat which constitute so large a portion of his food. Yet the lamp, generally made of stone, with its moss wick, and the stone kettle, play an important part among the implements and culinary apparatus of an Esquimaux’s hut. On those he depends for his supply of water from melted snow, for thawing and drying his clothes, and for cooking; and without the light of the lamp the indoor life of the long unbroken arctic night would be spent as in a living tomb. The Esquimaux generally possess a piece of iron pyrites and of quartz. These serve them for flint and steel, with which they ignite a tuft of dried moss frayed in the hand. But they are also familiar with the more laborious fire-making process by means of friction, which is in general use throughout America.

At the opposite extremity of the Continent lies Tierra del Fuego, the natives of which are exposed to still greater privations, and have been pronounced by observant voyagers as among the most degraded of savage races. Yet the Fuegians exhibit considerable ingenuity in constructing their fishing tackle, slings, bows and stone-tipped arrows, stone knives, and javelins pointed with bone. A bone harpoon in use by them, barbed only on one side (Fig. 33), resembles examples already referred to found in the Dordogne and other caves of the era when the mammoth and its hunters existed together in Southern France. M. Lecoq de Boisbeaudrau suggests that the deflection of the harpoon so formed serves as an equivalent for the refraction of the fish in the water, and thus the fisherman secures an unerring aim. If so, it furnishes an ingenious application of the fruits of experience directed to rectify a difficulty common to the modern Fuegian and to the Troglodyte of post-glacial times.

The canoes of the Fuegians are rudely constructed of bark sewed together with prepared sinews. In the bottom a hearth of clay is made, on which they habitually keep a fire alight. They too have learned the value of iron pyrites, and with its help readily obtain the spark required for igniting their prepared tinder of dried moss or fungus. Captain Weddell states that he produced the tinder-box in presence of a party of Fuegians, in order to ascertain how fire is obtained by them, and presently he discovered that his steel had been purloined. This, however, he recovered, and after sending the culprit to his canoe with threats of punishment, he learned that they procure fire by rubbing iron pyrites and a flinty stone together, catching the sparks in a dry substance resembling moss.[58]

The ancient use of pyrites for fire-making is supposed to be embodied in its etymology (πῦρ). Mr. John Evans has pointed out that the lower beds of the same English chalk in which the flint abounds are prolific of pyrites; and he makes the suggestion that the use of a nodule of pyrites for a hammer-stone in the process of manufacturing flint implements, may have led to the discovery of this method of producing fire. But if so, it is a discovery of remote antiquity, for such nodules have been found both in French and Belgian caves, associated with the bones of fossil mammals and worked flints of the palæolithic era. They also occur in the Swiss lake-dwellings, as at Robenhausen, along with neolithic implements.

But pyrites is not always available; and Esquimaux, Fuegians, and Australians practise also the more usual, and probably the more ancient, method of producing fire by friction. The process among the Tahitians and South Sea islanders is pursued in the laboriously artless fashion of rubbing one piece of wood against another; though it is said that, with perfectly dry wood, they obtain fire in this way in two or three minutes. Australian fire-making is effected in nearly the same way; but the American Indians have improved on the process by the use of the bow and drill. Among the Iroquois and other tribes, the drill was provided with a stone whorl, or fly-wheel, to give it momentum; and when rapidly revolved by means of a bow and string, with the point resting on a piece of dry wood, surrounded with moss or punk, sparks are produced in a few seconds, and the tinder is ignited.

The art of fire-making is thus found in use among savage nations, even in the most degraded state: as among the Fuegians, whose wretched condition and repulsive appearance and habits have led travellers to describe them as scarcely human. They are indeed in every way inferior to the Esquimaux. Yet their implements and weapons display remarkable ingenuity and skill; and the origin of the name of their desolate region is traced to the numerous fires seen by the first Spanish discoverers who navigated its coasts.

The aborigines of Australia rival the Fuegians alike in physical and intellectual degradation; but, like them also, have achieved or perpetuated the discovery which lies at the very foundation of all possible civilisation. According to the inconsequential account furnished by a native Australian of their first acquisition of fire:—“A long, long time ago a little bandicoot[59] was the sole owner of a fire-brand, which he cherished with the greatest jealousy. So selfish was he in the use of his prize, that he obstinately refused to share it with the other animals. So they held a general council, where it was decided that the fire must be obtained from the bandicoot either by force or strategy. The hawk and pigeon were deputed to carry out this resolution; and after vainly trying to induce the fire-owner to share its blessings with his neighbours, the pigeon, seizing, as he thought, an unguarded moment, made a dash to obtain the prize. The bandicoot saw that affairs had come to a crisis, and, in desperation, threw the fire towards the river, there to quench it for ever. But, fortunately for the black man, the sharp-eyed hawk was hovering near, and seeing the fire falling into the water, with a stroke of his wing he knocked the brand far over the stream into the long dry grass of the opposite bank, which immediately ignited, and the flames spread over the face of the country. The black man then felt the fire, and said it was good.”[60]

The discovery of the art of fire-making, prefigured in this rude myth, is intimately associated in the minds of the Australian aborigines with their distinctive ideas of man. According to the mythology of the Booroung tribe, inhabiting the Mallee country, on Lake Tyrill, they were preceded on the earth by a race of Nurrumbunguttias, or old spirits, who had the knowledge of fire; but these were translated to heaven before the black man came into existence. One of them, named _War_, or the Crow,—the Australian Prometheus,—is now the star Canopus; and he it was who first brought fire back to earth, and gave it to the black men.[61]

It is a noticeable fact that, while the Maoris of New Zealand use the same word, _ahi_, for fire, which under slight modifications is employed through widely severed island groups of the Pacific: different Australian tribes use distinct names for it, as _darloo_ at Moreton Bay, _koyung_ at Lake Macquarrie, and _kaubi_ at Bathurst. In the Kamilarai of Wellington Valley it is called _koyan_; while in the Wiradurei, spoken about 200 miles inland from Lake Macquarrie, it is _win_. Such diversity of names for the common acquisition proves that fire is no recent novelty derived from a single source by the savage tribes of that strange southern continent.

Amid all the remarkable evidence recently disclosed relative to the antiquity and the rude arts of primitive man, nothing has yet appeared suggestive of a condition inferior to the savages of Tierra del Fuego or Australia; while much tends to an opposite conclusion. Alike in physical development and in arts, the Troglodytes of the Dordogne caves were undoubtedly far in advance of either; and yet they were the contemporaries of the mammoth, the Siberian rhinoceros, the cave- lion and bear, the gigantic Irish elk, the reindeer, and the fossil horse of Central Europe,—the men of a period separated from our own by epochs the duration of which can be gauged by no standards of historical chronology. It could scarcely admit of doubt that such men were capable of achieving the art of fire-making. It might even be questioned if they could have subsisted under the conditions of life marking that post-glacial epoch without the use of fire. But on this subject we are not left to conjecture.

The contents of the Aurignac cavern, in the department of the Haute-Garonne, at the foot of the Pyrenees, were at first supposed to disclose a singularly interesting example of sepulture contemporaneous with the fossil mammals of the drift; and accompanied not only with implements and personal ornaments fashioned from their bones and tusks, as well as others of flint; but with the ashes of the funeral fires and the débris of the funeral feast which formed a part of the last rites to the dead. Unfortunately some discredit has been cast on the evidence which seemed to indicate that the remains of extinct mammalia, and those of the entombed dead, were contemporaneous; and the importance of the deductions which this discovery seemed to justify render it all the more needful that the proof should be indisputable. But the practice of regular interment of the dead, accompanied with some funeral rites, by the men of the post-glacial age, is suggested by the contents of the sepulchral recess of Cro-Magnon, in the valley of the Vézère. No ashes of funeral fires can be pointed to, but the traces of the use of fire are abundant.

Throughout the floors of various caves in this district which have been rich in disclosures of primitive art, particles of charcoal abound at every level where broken bones occur, suggesting that fires were in daily use, and were employed for cooking much more than for warmth. Possibly, indeed, those caverns were only the summer dwellings of the Drift-Folk of post-glacial times; and with them, as with the Esquimaux, and the Indians of North America generally, fire may have been valued as a protection against the noxious insects which, especially in the brief summer of a rigorous climate, render life intolerable. Fire is the universal servant of man. The Esquimaux and the Red Indian ward off the mosquito, the black-fly, and the sand-fly by means of a “smudge” made with the smoke of grass and green-wood; while the Hottentot or Bushman kindles his night-fire in the tropics as the most effectual guardian against beasts of prey. Everywhere, and at all epochs, fire appears as one of the most characteristic indices of rational man; and as we study such traces of him as reappear for us in the works of art and the extinguished fires of the Moustier and Madelaine cave-dwellings, or those of the neolithic, if not an earlier period of the Aurignac catacomb, we see the unmistakable evidences of human intelligence; and anew concur in the decision of Columbus, that the night-torch of the Guanahanè savage was indisputable proof that the unknown world which lay before him was the habitation of man.

It may be doubted if man has anywhere existed without the knowledge of fire. By means of it some of his earliest triumphs over nature have been achieved. With its aid his range is no longer limited to latitudes where the spontaneous fruits of the earth abound at every season. The use of fire lies at the root of all the industrial arts. The friendly savages found by Columbus on the first-discovered island of the New World were armed with wooden lances, hardened at the end by its means. The most civilised among the nations conquered by Cortes and Pizarro, had learned by the same means to smelt the ores of the Andes, and make of their metallic alloys the tools with which to quarry and hew the rocks, to sculpture the statues of the gods of Anahuac, and the palaces and temples of the Peruvian children of the sun. Without fire the imperfect implements of the stone period would be altogether inadequate to man’s necessities. By its help he fells the lofty trees, against which his unaided stone hatchet would be powerless. It plays a no less important part in preparing the log-canoe of the savage, than in propelling the wonderful steamship, by means of which the great lakes and rivers of the New World have become the highways of migrating nations.

A common root-word for fire serves to connect numerous scattered insular races of the great Pacific archipelagos, through their intercourse with the Malay voyagers. Yet while the Malay word _ápi_ may be taken as the source of many diversified forms of the insular term for fire, the Papuans, rather than the Malays, present the ethnical peculiarities predominant throughout Polynesia, and characteristic of the Maoris of New Zealand; and distinct roots in many intermediate island vocabularies prove the independent knowledge of fire. The Vitian is rich in terms for light, warmth, shining, kindling, burning, boiling, etc. _Aundre_, to shine or flame, becomes _oundreva_, to kindle, and _vakaundre_, to cause to burn. From _yame_, the tongue, is made, by a familiar analogy, _yame-ni-mbuka_, a flame of fire. _Ilgatu_, fire, begets a group of words, including _ilgilaiso_, charcoal, and _ilgilaisongawa_, hot cinders. _Liva_, a flash of lightning, gives _lavi_, to bring fire, _lovo_, a furnace, a native oven; and recalls one familiar source of the knowledge of fire: as the _asa_, the sun; _atua_, a deity, probably the sun-god; _asu_, smoke, etc., of the Rotuma dialect suggest another association of ideas common to the Old and New World.

The fire-worship of the Ghebirs is but a degraded form of that homage to visible divinity with which man worships the god of day, and bows down before the heavenly host. Among the civilised nations of the New World, accordingly, a peculiar sanctity was associated with the familiar service of fire. At the close of the great cycle of the Aztecs, when the calendar was corrected to true solar time at the end of the fifty-second year, a high religious festival was held, on the eve of which they broke in pieces their household gods, destroyed their furniture, and extinguished every fire. In the reconstruction of the ritual calendar, the intercalated days were held as though non-existent, and dedicated to no gods: on which account they were reputed unfortunate. At the end of that dreary interval of fasting and penitence, during which no hearth smoked, and no warm food could be eaten throughout the land, the ceremony of the new fire was celebrated. After sunset the priests of the great temple went forth to a neighbouring mountain, and there, at midnight, the sacred flame was rekindled, which was to light up the national fires for another cycle. The process by which it was procured, by revolving one piece of dry wood in the hollow of another, is repeatedly illustrated in the Mexican paintings of Lord Kingsborough’s work. But, true to the bloody rites of the national faith, at this sacred festival the fire was kindled on the breast of a human victim, from whence the reeking heart was immediately afterwards torn out, and cast as a bloody offering to the gods. The period from the extinction to the rekindling of the sacred flame was one of great suspense. With a superstitious feeling, in striking accordance with the customs and ideas of the northern Indians, the women remained confined to their houses, with their faces covered, under the belief that if they witnessed the ceremony they would be forthwith transformed into beasts. Meanwhile, the men gathered on the terraced roofs, and looked forth in dread suspense into the darkness. The flames on the summits of the great teocallis, which lighted up the city at all other seasons, had been extinguished; and if the priests failed to rekindle them, it was believed that the night must be eternal, and the world would come to an end. But dimly, through the darkness, a spark was seen to glimmer on the distant summit of the mountain, and from thence it was swiftly borne to the temple, towards which the worshippers turned with renewed hope. As the sacred flame again blazed on the high altar, and was distributed to the other teocallis, shouts of triumph ascended with it to the sky. Feasts, joyous processions, and oblations at the temples followed, and were prolonged through a festival of thirteen days, devoted to a national jubilee for the recovered flame, the type of a regenerated world.[62] The long interval which transpired between this closing rite of the great cycle was of itself sufficient to give it an impressive sanctity in the eyes of the Aztec worshipper. He who witnessed it in youth saw it only once again as life drew towards a close; whilst few indeed of all who rejoiced at the renewed gift of fire could expect to look again on the strangely significant rite. Compared with the annual miracle of the Greek Church in the crypt of the Holy Sepulchre, to which it bears some resemblance, the great festival of the Aztecs was replete with significance and solemn grandeur, though stained with the blood of their hideous sacrifices.

The Peruvian sun-worshippers preserved the harmony between their recurrent festivals and the true solar time, by a ruder process of adjustment than that which was devised by the remarkable proficiency of the Aztec priests in astronomical science. Nevertheless, they too had their secular festival of Raymi, held annually at the period of the summer solstice. For three days previous a general fast prevailed, the fire on the great altar of the sun went out, and in all the dwellings of the land no hearth was kindled. As the dawn of the fourth day approached, the Inca, surrounded by his nobles, who came from all parts of the country to join in the solemn celebration, assembled in the great square of the capital to greet the rising sun. The temple of the national deity presented its eastern portal to the earliest rays, emblazoned with his golden image, thickly set with precious stones; and as the first beams of the morning were reflected back from this emblem of the sun-god, songs of triumph mingled with the jubilant shout of his worshippers. Then after various rites of adoration, preparations were made for rekindling the sacred fire. But this, with the Peruvians, was done by a process far in advance of that retained by the Aztec priests. The rays of the sun, collected into a focus by a concave mirror of polished metal, were made to inflame a heap of dried cotton; and a llama was sacrificed as a burnt-offering to the sun. Only in the case of the sky being overcast did the priests resort to friction for rekindling the altar; but the hiding of his countenance by the god of day was regarded as little less ominous than the extinction of the sacred fire, which it became the duty of the virgins of the sun to guard throughout the year. A slaughter of the llama flocks of the sun furnished a universal banquet; and, while the god was propitiated by offerings of fruit and flowers, there appear to have been some rare occasions on which the sacrifice of a human victim—a beautiful maiden or a child,—gave to this graceful anniversary a nearer resemblance to the appalling rites of Aztec worship.

Among the northern Indian tribes some faint traces of the annual festival of fire are discernible. At the sacrifice of the white dog, the New Year’s festival of the Iroquois, the proceedings extended over six days; and such were the obligations which its rites imposed on all, that if any member of a family died during the period, the body was laid aside, and the relatives participated in the games as well as the religious ceremonies. The strangling of the white dog destined for sacrifice was the chief feature of the first day’s proceedings. On the second day the two keepers of the faith visited each house, and performed the significant ceremony of stirring the ashes on the hearth, accompanied with a thanksgiving to the Great Spirit. On the morning of the fifth day the fire was solemnly kindled by friction; and the white dog was borne in procession on a bark litter, until the officiating leaders halted, facing the rising sun, when it was laid on the flaming wood and consumed, during an address, which included a special thanksgiving to the sun, for having looked on the earth with a beneficent eye.[63]

There is, perhaps, no connection traceable between the various rites thus described; for it would be easy to find their parallels among ancient and modern nations. They pertained to the religious practices of the Chaldeans, to the rites of Baal, and to other early forms of idolatry. Sabaism is indeed the most natural form of false worship, commending itself by many visible tokens, as of a divine influence and power, to uninstructed man; and readily suggests the association of fire with the sun as its source. “Take ye good heed unto yourselves,” says the lawgiver of Israel to the tribes in the wilderness, “for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire; lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them.” This worship of the sun, though associated with ancient rites of Asiatic nations, is not therefore necessarily an evidence of the eastern origin either of the faith or of the nations of the New World. But, in the services to which it gave rise there, we have, at least, suggestive hints of the links that bind together its own ancient and modern tribes. Perhaps also they may supply a clew to the interpretation of some of the obscure sculptures still remaining on sites of the extinct native civilisation of America, and of rites once practised amid the sacred enclosures, and on the altar-mounds which give such peculiar interest to the river-terraces of the Mississippi valley.

Among the remarkable structures of the Mound-Builders, reviewed in a subsequent chapter, their explorers have been struck by the peculiarities of a certain class of mounds, erected on the most elevated summits of outlying hills. Concerning these “there can be no doubt that the ancient people selected prominent and elevated positions upon which to build large fires, which were kept burning for long periods, or renewed at frequent intervals. They appear to have been built generally upon heaps of stones, which are broken up and sometimes partially vitrified. In all cases they exhibit marks of intense and protracted heat.”[64] Such indications have been supposed to mark ancient signal-stations adapted to the telegraphic system still in use among native tribes, of sending up columns of smoke as a warning that enemies are at hand. But this “putting out fire,” as it is called among the Indians of the north-west, for the purposes of signal, is now accomplished by the simple process of setting the short-tufted buffalo grass in flame, and presents slight analogy to the traces of intense fires on the ancient hill-mounds, where the amount of scoriaceous material often covers a large space several feet deep.

Perhaps greater importance is due to the employment of the same method of fire-making at the present day among the Indians of the north-west, as we see illustrated in ancient Aztec paintings; while the sun-worshippers of the southern continent had devised a totally distinct method, corresponding to that by which the Romans kindled the sacred fire. Mr. Paul Kane thus describes the process employed by the Chinooks on the Columbia River:—“The fire is obtained by means of a flat piece of dry cedar, in which a small hollow is cut, with a channel for the ignited charcoal to run over; on this the Indian sits to hold it steady, while he rapidly twirls a round stick of the same wood between the palms of his hands, with the point pressed into the hollow. In a very short time sparks begin to fall through the channel upon finely frayed cedar-bark placed underneath, which they soon ignite. There is a great deal of knack in doing this, but those who are used to it will light a fire in a very short time. The men usually carry these sticks about with them, as after they have been once used they produce the fire more quickly.”[65] I witnessed the process successfully employed under the most unfavourable circumstances, on one occasion when camping out with Chippewa guides on the Lake of Bays, in Western Canada. We had struck our tents, and were making our way down the river, when a steady rain set in, which continued throughout the day. We had to pass several long portages, involving in each case the unloading, and carrying over them, our canoes and baggage; and on one of these occasions, finding myself alone with my Indian guide at the foot of a portage where we must necessarily be detained a considerable time, I suggested to him by words and signs, whether it were possible to kindle a fire. Rain was falling in torrents, the trees were dripping, and the grass and fallen leaves resembled a soaked sponge. But Kineesè set to work in Indian fashion, hunted out a pine-knot, such as are of common occurrence in the Canadian forest, where the tree itself has rotted away and left the cores of its oldest branches like pins of iron. Having secured this, and a piece of half-burned wood from under the remains of an old camp-fire, he next stripped off the bark from the lee-side of a birch tree, and collecting a heap of the dry inner bark, thin as paper, he carefully disposed it under a cover of pine-bark, and placed over all a pile of chips cut with his axe from the centre of a pine log. All being now ready, he frayed a handful of the birch-bark into the consistency of tow, and placing this on the charred wood, he made the hard point of the pine-knot revolve in the wood by means of a cord, while his bent position, pressing the other end to his breast, protected it from the rain. In a surprisingly short time he blew the tinder into a flame, applied it to the pile he had prepared, and nursing this with chips and dry twigs, we were able to welcome our companions to a blazing log fire, kindled under circumstances which, even with the aid of flint and steel, would have seemed impossible to the European woodsman.

The knowledge of this simple process, however acquired, constitutes perhaps the oldest of all human traditions relating to the arts of life. A mode of obtaining fire nearly equivalent to that of flint and steel has already been referred to as in use both among the Fuegians and Esquimaux; but the process of friction is also resorted to by the latter, and with slight variations in the application of the principle, it appears to be the recognised Indian mode of procuring fire. Among all the Indian tribes not only was a certain superstitious sanctity attached to fire, but they looked with distrust on the novel methods employed by Europeans for its production. When, in 1811, Elksatowa, the prophet of the Wabash,—a brother of Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior,—was exhorting his tribe to resist the deadly encroachments of the white man, he concluded one of his eloquent warnings by exclaiming: “Throw away your fire-steels, and awaken the sleeping flame as your fathers did before you; fling away your wrought coverings, and put on skins won for yourselves as was their wont, if you would escape the anger of the Great Spirit.” Nor is there wanting among many Indians a conviction that the Ishkodaiwaubo, or fire-liquid, is a malignant form of the same mysterious element; an evil medicine wrought for their destruction by the white Manitou.

Various methods are thus traceable throughout the western hemisphere for calling into existence the wondrous element, so peculiarly distinctive of man. Yet even in these, common relations of a very comprehensive character are apparent; while the Peruvian, with the solar mirror, stands apart alike from the rude Indian and the cultivated native of the Mexican plateau; and far to the south of both, the Fuegian finds in the natural products of his inhospitable clime a means of fire-making analogous to that which the Shawnee prophet taught his people to regard as one of the unhallowed practices of the Whites. All alike exhibit man, even in the rudest stage, master of the same secret; and turning to many useful, and even indispensable purposes, that which no other animal can be taught to use, or scarcely even to look upon without dread.

[57] Floureus, _De la Longévité Humaine_, p. 127.

[58] Weddell’s _Voyage towards the South Pole in 1822-24_, p. 167.

[59] A small sharp-nosed animal, not unlike the Guinea-pig.

[60] _Canadian Journal, N.S._, vol. i. p. 509.

[61] _Trans. Philosoph. Institute, Victoria_, vol. i.

[62] _Clavigero_, vol. ii. p. 84.

[63] _League of the Iroquois_, pp. 207-221.

[64] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, p. 183.

[65] _Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America_, p. 188.