s balsams, placed in a wicker basket, and kept suspended from the
door of their dwellings.[256-2] When the quantity of these heirlooms
became burdensome, they were removed to some inaccessible cavern, and
stowed away with reverential care. Such was the cave Ataruipe, a visit
to which has been so eloquently described by Alexander von Humboldt in
his "Views of Nature."

So great was the filial respect for these remains by the Indians, that
on the Mississippi, in Peru, and elsewhere, no tyranny, no cruelty, so
embittered the indigenes against the white explorers as the sacrilegious
search for treasures perpetrated among the sepulchres of past
generations. Unable to understand the meaning of such deep feeling, so
foreign to the European who, without a second thought, turns a cemetery
into a public square, or seeds it down in wheat, the Jesuit missionaries
in Paraguay accuse the natives of worshipping the skeletons of their
forefathers,[257-1] and the English in Virginia repeated it of the
Powhatans.

The question has been debated and variously answered, whether the art of
mummification was known and practised in America. Without entering into
the discussion, it is certain that preservation of the corpse by a long
and thorough process of exsiccation over a slow fire was nothing
unusual, not only in Peru, Popoyan, the Carib countries, and Nicaragua,
but among many of the tribes north of the Gulf of Mexico, as I have
elsewhere shown.[257-2] The object was essentially the same as when the
bones alone were preserved; and in the case of rulers, the same homage
was often paid to their corpses as had been the just due of their living
bodies.

The opinion underlying all these customs was, that a part of the soul,
or one of the souls, dwelt in the bones; that these were the seeds
which, planted in the earth, or preserved unbroken in safe places,
would, in time, put on once again a garb of flesh, and germinate into
living human beings. Language illustrates this not unusual theory. The
Iroquois word for bone is _esken_--for soul, _atisken_, literally that
which is within the bone.[257-3] In an Athapascan dialect bone is
_yani_, soul _i-yune_.[257-4] The Hebrew Rabbis taught that in the bone
_lutz_, the coccyx, remained at death the germ of a second life, which,
at the proper time, would develop into the purified body, as the plant
from the seed.

But mythology and supersitions[TN-15] add more decisive testimony. One of
the Aztec l