rd it as a fragment of some ancient and common tongue, their parent
stem. In the Eskimo it is _inuk_, _innuk_, plural _innuit_; in Athapasca
it is _dinni_, _tenne_; in Algonkin, _inini_, _lenni_, _inwi_; in
Iroquois, _onwi_, _eniha_; in the Otomi of Mexico _n-aniehe_; in the
Maya, _inic_, _winic_, _winak_; all in North America, and the number
might be extended. Of these only the last mentioned can plausibly be
traced to a radical (unless the Iroquois _onwi_ is from _onnha_ life,
_onnhe_ to live). This Father Ximenes derives from _win_, meaning to
grow, to gain, to increase,[223-1] in which the analogy to vegetable
life is not far off, an analogy strengthened by the myth of that stock,
which relates that the first of men were formed of the flour of
maize.[223-2]

In many other instances religious legend carries out this idea. The
mythical ancestor of the Caribs created his offspring by sowing the soil
with stones or with the fruit of the Mauritius palm, which sprouted
forth into men and women,[224-1] while the Yurucares, much of whose
mythology was perhaps borrowed from the Peruvians, clothed this crude
tenet in a somewhat more poetic form, fabling that at the beginning the
first of men were pegged, Ariel-like, in the knotty entrails of an
enormous hole, until the god Tiri--a second Prospero--released them by
cleaving it in twain.[224-2]

As in oriental legends the origin of man from the earth was veiled under
the story that he was the progeny of some mountain fecundated by the
embrace of Mithras or Jupiter, so the Indians often pointed to some
height or some cavern, as the spot whence the first of men issued, adult
and armed, from the womb of the All-mother Earth. The oldest name of the
Alleghany Mountains is Paemotinck or Pemolnick, an Algonkin word, the
meaning of which is said to be "the origin of the Indians."[224-3]

The Witchitas, who dwelt on the Red River among the mountains named
after them, have a tradition that their progenitors issued from the
rocks about their homes,[225-1] and many other tribes the Tahkalis,
Navajos, Coyoteras, and the Haitians, for instance, set up this claim to
be autochthones. Most writers have interpreted this simply to mean that
they knew nothing at all about their origin, or that they coined these
fables merely to strengthen the title to the territory they inhabited
when they saw the whites eagerly snatching it away on every pretext. No
doubt there is some truth in this, but if the