** I am careful not to call Samoan sacred animals "Totems." to which Mr. Tylor justly objects, but I think the Samoan belief has Totemistic origins. CHAPTER XIV. AMERICAN DIVINE MYTHS Novelty of the "New World "--Different stages of culture represented there--Question of American Monotheism-- Authorities and evidence cited--Myths examined: Eskimo, Ahts, Thlinkeets, Iroquois, the Great Hare--Dr. Brinton's theory of the hare--Zuni myths--Transition to Mexican mythology. The divine myths of the vast American continent are a topic which a lifetime entirely devoted to the study could not exhaust. At best it is only a sketch in outline that can be offered in a work on the development of mythology in general. The subject is the more interesting as anything like systematic borrowing of myths from the Old World is all but impossible, as has already been argued in chapter xi. America, it is true, may have been partially "discovered" many times; there probably have been several points and moments of contact between the New and the Old World. Yet at the time when the Spaniards landed there, and while the first conquests and discoveries were being pursued, the land and the people were to Europeans practically as novel as the races and territories of a strange planet.* But the New World only revealed the old stock of humanity in many of its familiar stages of culture, and, consequently, with the old sort of gods, and myths, and creeds. * Reville, Hibbert Lectures, 1884, p. 8 In the evolution of politics, society, ritual, and in all the outward and visible parts of religion, the American races ranged between a culture rather below the ancient Egyptian and a rudeness on a level with Australian or Bushman institutions. The more civilised peoples, Aztecs and Peruvians, had many peculiarities in common with the races of ancient Egypt, China and India; where they fell short was in the lack of alphabet or syllabary. The Mexican MSS. are but an advanced picture-writing, more organised than that of the Ojibbeways; the Peruvian Quipus was scarcely better than the Red Indian wampum records. Mexicans and Peruvians were settled in what deserved to be called cities; they had developed a monumental and elaborately decorated architecture; they were industrious in the arts known to them, though ignorant of iron. Among the Aztecs, at least, weapons and tools of bronze, if rare, were not unknown. They were sedulous in agriculture, disciplined in war, capable of absorbing and amalgamating with conquered tribes.