ral descent from different wild beasts, probably in all other
instances, as in these, this will prove, on examination, to be an error
resting on a misapprehension arising from the habit of the natives of
adopting as their totem or clan-mark the figure and name of some animal,
or else, in an ignorance of the animate symbols employed with such
marked preference by the red race to express abstract ideas. In some
cases, doubtless, the natives themselves came, in time, to confound the
symbol with the idea, by that familiar process of personification and
consequent debasement exemplified in the history of every religion; but
I do not believe that a single example could be found where an Indian
tribe had a tradition whose real purport was that man came by natural
process of descent from an ancestor, a brute.

The reflecting mind will not be offended at the contradictions in these
different myths, for a myth is, in one sense, a theory of natural
phenomena expressed in the form of a narrative. Often several
explanations seem equally satisfactory for the same fact, and the mind
hesitates to choose, and rather accepts them all than rejects any. Then,
again, an expression current as a metaphor by-and-by crystallizes into a
dogma, and becomes the nucleus of a new mythological growth. These are
familiar processes to one versed in such studies, and involve no logical
contradiction, because they are never required to be reconciled.

FOOTNOTES:

[223-1] _Vocabulario Quiche_, s. v., ed. Brasseur, Paris, 1862.

[223-2] The Eskimo _innuk_, man, means also a possessor or owner; the
yelk[TN-10] of an egg; and the pus of an abscess (Egede, _Nachrichten von
Groenland_, p. 106). From it is derived _innuwok_, to live, life. Probably
_innuk_ also means the _semen masculinum_, and in its identification with
pus, may not there be the solution of that strange riddle which in so
many myths of the West Indies and Central America makes the first of men
to be "the purulent one?" (See ante, p. 135.)

[224-1] Mueller, _Amer. Urrelig._, pp. 109, 229.

[224-2] D'Orbigny, _Frag. d'une Voy. dans l'Amer. Merid._, p. 512. It is
still a mooted point whence Shakspeare drew the plot of The Tempest. The
coincidence mentioned in the text between some parts of it and South
American mythology does not stand alone. Caliban, the savage and brutish
native of the island, is undoubtedly the word Carib, often spelt
Caribani, and Calibani in older writers; and his "da