e Delawares had five festivals in the year, one in
honour of fire, supposed to have been the parent of all the Indian
nations. Like other nations, these people believed in the necessity
of purification from guilt, by fasting and bodily mortification.
Some underwent for this end the pain of being beaten with sticks
from the sole of their feet to their head. 'Some gave the poor
people vomits as the most expeditious mode.'

"Like the Northern Asiatics, the American nations had, instead of a
regular priesthood, jugglers or sorcerers, who pretended to have
supernatural power and knowledge. They appear to conform in every
respect to the schamans of the Siberians, and the Fetiss-seers of
the African nations."

We have, in the above extracts, placed in juxtaposition the leading
psychical characteristics of the five divisions of mankind. There are
some points in which the different races of man seem, in their various
superstitions and creeds, curiously agreed. The doctrine of sacrificial
atonement seems almost universally prevalent, and forms the basis of the
various sacerdotal institutions. The care of the dead is also another
peculiarity, and one in which mankind appear, from the earliest
historical period, to have differed from other animals.

The susceptibility to receive the doctrines of Christianity is a
circumstance of agreement among the various races of mankind, from which
the Bushmen of South Africa are the only exception; and, viewing these
as a branch of the Hottentots, this exception would seem to
disappear--for the latter have been converted. The following is the
satisfactory account of the Hottentot missionaries as to the moral
effect of Christianity:--

"It is the unvarying statement of these missionaries, deduced from
the experience of a hundred years of patient service and laborious
exertions among the rudest and most abject tribes of human beings;
that the moral nature of man must be in the first instance
quickened, the conscience awakened, and the better feelings of the
heart aroused, by the motives which Christianity brings with it,
before any improvement can be hoped for in the outward behaviour
and social state; that the rudest savages have sufficient
understanding to be susceptible of such a change; and that, when it
has once taken place, all the blessings of civilization follow as a
necessary