be adopted in place of a warrior who had fallen. In that event, the allegiance, and as it were the identity, of the captive, the current of his affections and his duties, became changed. The children and the wife whom he had left at home are to be blotted from his memory: he is to be the departed chieftain, resuscitated and brought back from the dwelling-place of shadows, to cherish those whom he cherished; to hate those whom he hated; to rekindle his passions; to retaliate his wrongs; to hunt for his cabin; to fight for his clan. And the foreigner thus adopted is esteemed to stand in the same relations of consanguinity, and to be bound by the same restraints in regard to marriage.

More commonly, it was the captive's lot to endure torments and death, in the forms which Brebeuf has described. On the way to the cabins of his conquerors, the hands of an Iroquois prisoner were crushed between stones, his fingers torn off or mutilated, the joints of his arms scorched and gashed, while he himself preserved his tranquillity, and sang the songs of his nation. Arriving at the homes of his conquerors, all the cabins regaled him; and a young girl was bestowed on him, to be the companion of his captivity and the object of his last loves. At one village after another, he was present at festivals which were given in his name, and at which he was obliged to sing. The old chief, who might have adopted him in place of a fallen nephew, chose rather to gratify revenge, and pronounced the doom of death. "That is well," was his reply. The sister of the fallen warrior, into whose place it had been proposed to receive him, still treated him with tenderness as a brother, offering him food, and serving him with interest and regard; her father caressed him as though he had become his kinsman, gave him a pipe, and wiped the thick drops of sweat from his face. His last entertainment, made at the charge of the bereaved chief, began at noon. To the crowd of his guests he declared: "My brothers, I am going to die; make merry around me with good heart: I am a man; I fear neither death nor your torments;" and he sang aloud. The feast being ended, he was conducted to the cabin of blood. They place him on a mat, and bind his hands; he rises, and

dances round the cabin, chanting his death-song. At eight in the evening, eleven fires which had been kindled are hedged in by files of spectators. The young men selected to be the actors are exhorted to do well, for their deeds would be grateful to Areskoui, the powerful war-god. A war-chief strips the prisoner, shows him naked to the people, and assigns their office to the tormentors. Then ensued a scene the most horrible: torments lasted till after sunrise, when the wretched victim, bruised, gashed, mutilated, halfroasted, and scalped, was carried out of the village, and hacked in pieces. A festival upon his flesh completed the sacrifice. Such were the customs that Europeans have displaced.

The solemn execution of the captive seems to have been, in part at least, an act of faith and a religious sacrifice. The dweller in the wilderness is conscious of his dependence; he feels the existence of relations with the universe by which he is surrounded and an invisible world; he recognises a nature higher than his own. His language, which gave him no separate word for causation, could give him no expression for a first cause; and, since he had no idea of existence except in connection with space and time, he could have no idea of an Infinite and Eternal Being. But, as the ideas of existence and causation were blended with words expressing action or quality, so the idea of divinity was blended with nature, and yet not wholly merged in the external world. So complete was this union, many travellers denied that they had any religion. "As to the knowledge of God," says Joutel, of the south-west, "it did not seem to us that they had any definite notion about it. True, we found upon our route some who, as far as we could judge, believed that there was something exalted, which is above all; but they have neither temples, nor ceremonies, nor prayers, marking a divine worship. That they have no religion, can be said of all whom we saw." "The northern nations," writes Le Caron, "recognise no divinity from motives of religion; they have neither sacrifice, nor temple, nor priest, nor ceremony of worship." Le Jeune also affirms: "There is among them very little superstition; they think

only of living and of revenge; they are not attached to the worship of any divinity." And yet they believed that some powerful genius had created the world; that unknown agen cies had made the heavens above them and the earth on which they dwelt. The god of the savage was what the metaphysician endeavors to express by the word substance. The red man, unaccustomed to generalization, obtained no conception of an absolute substance, of a self-existent being, but saw a divinity in every power. Wherever there was being, motion, or action, there to him was a spirit; and, in a special manner, wherever there appeared singular excellence among beasts or birds, or in the creation, there to him was the presence of a divinity. When he feels his pulse throb or his heart beat, he knows that it is a spirit. A god resides in the flint, to give forth the kindling, cheering fire; in the mountain cliff; in the cool recesses of the grottoes which nature has adorned; in each "little grass "that springs miraculously from the earth. "The woods, the wilds, and the waters respond to savage intelligence; the stars and the mountains live; the river, and the lake, and the waves have a spirit." Every hidden agency, every mysterious influence, is personified. A god dwells in the sun, and in the moon, and in the firmament; the spirit of the morning reddens in the eastern sky; a deity is present in the ocean and in the fire; the crag that overhangs the river has its genius; there is a spirit to the waterfall; a household god makes its abode in the Indian's wigwam, and consecrates his home; spirits climb upon the forehead, to weigh down the eyelids in sleep. Not the heavenly bodies only, the sky is filled with spirits that minister to man. Το the savage, divinity, broken, as it were, into an infinite number of fragments, fills all place and all being. The idea of unity in the creation may have existed contemporaneously; but it existed only in the germ, or as a vague belief derived from the harmony of the universe. Yet faith in the Great Spirit, when once presented, was promptly seized and appropriated, and so infused itself into the heart of remotest tribes that it came to be often considered as a portion of their original faith. Their shadowy aspirations and

creeds assumed, through the reports of missionaries, a more complete development; and a religious system was elicited from the pregnant but rude materials.

It is not fear which generates this belief in the existence of higher powers. The faith attaches to every thing, but most of all to that which is excellent; it is the undefined consciousness of the existence of inexplicable relations towards powers of which the savage cannot solve the origin or analyze the nature. His gods are not the offspring of terror; universal nature seems to him instinct with divinity. The Indian venerates what excites his amazement or interests his imagination. "The Illinois," writes the Jesuit Marest, "adore a sort of genius, which they call manitou: to them it is the master of life, the spirit that rules all things. A bird, a buffalo, a bear, a feather, a skin, — that is their manitou."

No tribe worshipped its prophets, or deified its heroes; no Indian adored his fellow-man, or paid homage to the dead. He turns from himself to the inferior world, which he believes also to be animated by spirits. The bird, that mysteriously cleaves the air, into which he cannot soar; the fish, that hides itself in the depths of the clear, cool lakes, which he cannot fathom; the beasts of the forest, whose unerring instincts, more sure than his own intelligence, seem like revelations, these enshrine the deity whom he adores. On the Ohio, Mermet questioned a medicine man, who venerated the buffalo as his manitou. He confessed that he did not worship the buffalo, but the invisible spirit which is the type of all buffaloes. to the bear?" "Yes." "To certain; man is superior to all." Why do you not, then, invoke the manitou of man?" And the juggler knew not what to answer. It has been said by speculative philosophy that no Indian ever chose the manitou of a man for his object of adoration, because he adored only the unknown, and man is the being most intimately known to him. It seems that the very instinct which prompted the savage to adore was an instinct which prompted him to recognise his closer connection with the world. To have worshipped the

"Is there such a manitou man?" "Nothing more

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manitou of a man would have been to put himself only in nearer relations with his own kind; the gulf between him and the universe would have remained as wide as ever. The instincts towards man led to marriage, society, and political institutions. The sentiment of devotion sought to pass beyond the region of humanity, and enter into intimate communion with nature and the beings to whom imagination intrusted its control, with the sun and moon, the forests, the rivers, the lakes, the fishes, the birds, -all which has an existence independent of man, and manifests a power which he can neither create nor destroy.

Nor did the savage distrust his imaginations. Something within him affirmed with authority that there was more in them than fancies which he had called into being. Infidelity never clouded his mind; the shadows of skepticism never darkened his faith.

The piety of the savage was not merely a sentiment of passive resignation: he strove to propitiate the unknown, to avert their wrath, to secure their favor. If, at first, no traces of religious feeling were discerned, closer observation. showed that, everywhere among the red men, even among the roving tribes of the north, they had some kind of sacrifice and of prayer. If the harvest was abundant, if the chase was successful, they saw in their success the influence of a manitou; and they would ascribe even an ordinary accident to the wrath of the god. "O manitou!" exclaimed an Indian, at daybreak, with his family about him, lamenting the loss of a child, “thou art angry with me; turn thine anger from me, and spare the rest of my children." Canonicus, the great sachem of the Narragansetts, when bent with age, having buried his son, "burned his own dwelling, and all his goods in it, in part as a humble expiation to the god who, as they believe, had taken his sonne from him." At their feasts, they were careful not to profane the bones of the elk, the beaver, and other game, lest the spirits of these animals should pass by and behold the indignity; and then the living of the same species, instructed of the outrage, would ever after be careful to escape the toils and the arrows of the hunter. There were also occasions on which