id. 104--"Belus, the deity above mentioned, cut off his own

head, upon which the other gods mixed the blood as it gushed out _with the earth_, and _from thence_ men _were formed. On this_ account it is that they are rational and partake of divine knowledge. _This_ Belus, whom men called _Dis, divided the darkness_ and separated the heavens from the earth," &c.

This testimony must be connected with the phrase so startling in the seventh ode of the fourth book of Horace, "_pulvis_ et umbra sumus," and with the text in Genesis iii. 19, "for dust thou art."[111] It may possibly be said that this is merely matter of every day's experience. But it is precisely at this point that we must ask those who dispute tradition to discard tradition. Do bodies--so far as the exterior senses tell us--return to dust, or to other forms of life? If it is true that we return to dust--Scripture apart--it is tradition and not experience which attests it, and yet so common is the belief, that it might readily pass as the result of common observation.

[111] Compare Cicero, De Legibus, i. 8: "Est igitur homini _cum deo similitudo_;" and with Gen. ii. 26, 27: "and God created man in his own likeness."

So general a tradition that man was created, and created out of the ground,[112] is so completely in accordance with the text of Genesis, that one can hardly see what more can be demanded; yet Catlin says[113]--"Though there is not a tribe in America but what has _some_ theory of man's _creation_, there is not one amongst them all that bears the _slightest resemblance_ to the Mosaic account." Catlin instances the traditions of the Mandans, Choctaws, and the Sioux--_1st_, The Mandans (who have the ceremony commemorative of _the Deluge_ referred to, ch. xi.), believe that they were created "under the ground." _2d_, The Choctaws assert that they "were created crawfish, living alternately under the ground and above it as they chose; and, creeping out at their little holes in the earth to get the warmth of the sun one sunny day, a portion of the tribe was driven away and could not return; they built the Choctaw village, and the remainder of the tribe are still living under the ground." The Iroquois, however, believe that they "came out of the ground," which is identical with the Greek notion of their being "autochthones" (_vide_ Colden,