awaits us. That work was unfortunate in its editor.
It is a monument of American extravagance and superficiality. Mr.
Schoolcraft was a man of deficient education and narrow prejudices,
pompous in style, and inaccurate in statements. The information
from original observers it contains is often of real value, but the
general views on aboriginal history and religion are shallow and
untrustworthy in the extreme.

A German professor, Dr. J. G. Mueller, has written quite a
voluminous work on American Primitive Religions (_Geschichte der
Amerikanischen Ur-religionen_, pp. 707: Basel, 1855). His theory is
that "at the south a worship of nature with the adoration of the
sun as its centre, at the north a fear of spirits combined with
fetichism, made up the two fundamental divisions of the religion of
the red race" (pp. 89, 90). This imaginary antithesis he traces out
between the Algonkin and Apalachian tribes, and between the Toltecs
of Guatemala and the Aztecs of Mexico. His quotations are nearly
all at second hand, and so little does he criticize his facts as to
confuse the Vaudoux worship of the Haitian negroes with that of
Votan in Chiapa. His work can in no sense be considered an
authority.

Very much better is the Anthropology of the late Dr. Theodore Waitz
(_Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_: Leipzig, 1862-66). No more
comprehensive, sound, and critical work on the indigenes of America
has ever been written. But on their religions the author is
unfortunately defective, being led astray by the hasty and
groundless generalizations of others. His great anxiety, moreover,
to subject all moral sciences to a realistic philosophy, was
peculiarly fatal to any correct appreciation of religious growth,
and his views are neither new nor tenable.

For a different reason I must condemn in the most unqualified
manner the attempt recently made by the enthusiastic and
meritorious antiquary, the Abbe E. Charles Brasseur (de Bourbourg),
to explain American mythology after the example of Euhemerus, of
Thessaly, as the apotheosis of history. This theory, which has been
repeatedly applied to other mythologies with invariable failure, is
now disowned by every distinguished student of European and
Oriental antiquity; and to seek to introduce it into American
re