us tribes lying on the
outskirts of more ancient nations.--ED.]

There are charlatans everywhere, but they are more numerous among
savages than anywhere else, because among these ignorant and
superstitious people the trade is at once more profitable and less
dangerous. As soon as a native of the Columbia is indisposed, no matter
what the malady, they send for the medicine man, who treats the patient
in the absurd manner usually adopted by these impostors, and with such
violence of manipulation, that often a sick man, whom a timely bleeding
or purgative would have saved, is carried off by a sudden death.

They deposite their dead in canoes, on rocks sufficiently elevated not
to be overflowed by the spring freshets. By the side of the dead are
laid his bow, his arrows, and some of his fishing implements; if it is
a woman, her beads and bracelets: the wives, the relatives and the
slaves of the defunct cut their hair in sign of grief, and for several
days, at the rising and setting of the sun, go to some distance from the
village to chant a funeral song.

These people have not, properly speaking, a public worship.[Y] I could
never perceive, during my residence among them, that they worshipped any
idol. They had, nevertheless, some small sculptured figures; but they
appeared to hold them in light esteem, offering to barter them for
trifles.

[Footnote Y: It is Coleridge who observes that _every tribe is
barbarous_ which has no recognised public worship or cult, and no
regular priesthood as opposed to self-constituted conjurors. It is, in
fact, by public worship alone that human society is organized and
vivified; and it is impossible to maintain such worship without a
sacerdotal order, however it be constituted. _No culture without a
cult_, is the result of the study of the races of mankind. Hence those
who would destroy religion are the enemies of civilization.--ED.]

Having travelled with one of the sons of the chief of the Chinooks
(Comcomly), an intelligent and communicative young man, I put to him
several questions touching their religious belief, and the following
is, in substance, what he told me respecting it: Men, according to their
ideas, were created by a divinity whom they name _Etalapass_; but they
were imperfect, having a mouth that was not opened, eyes that were fast
closed, hands and feet that were not moveable; in a word, they were
rather statues of flesh, than living men. A second divinity, whom they
c