We may say that America everywhere at the time of the discovery was in the polished stone age. It had progressed beyond the rough stone stage, but had not reached that of metals. True that copper, bronze and the precious ores were widely employed for a variety of purposes; but flaked and polished stone remained in all parts the principal material selected to produce a cutting edge. Probably three-fourths of the tribes were acquainted with the art of tempering and moulding clay into utensils or figures; but the potter’s wheel and the process of glazing had not been invented. Towns and buildings were laid out with a correct eye, and stone structures of symmetry were erected; but the square, the compass, the plumb line, and the scales and weight had not been devised.[58] Commodious boats of hollowed logs or of bark, or of skins stretched on frames, were in use on most of the waters; but the inventive faculties of their makers had not reached to either oars or sails to propel them,[59] the paddle alone being relied upon, and the rudder to guide them was unknown. The love of music is strong in the race, and wind instruments and those sounded by percussion had been devised in considerable variety; but the highest type, the string instruments, were beyond their capacity of invention. The religious sentiment was awake in all the tribes of the continent, and even the lowest had myths and propitiatory rites by which to explain to themselves and cajole to their own interests the unknown powers which order the destiny of human life. There is a singular similarity in these myths. The leading cycle of them usually describes the exploits of a divine man, the national hero-god, who was the first instructor, often the ancestor of the tribe, and the creator of the visible universe. His later history is related with singular parallelism by tribes in Canada and Mexico, in Yucatan and Uruguay. After teaching his people the arts of life and the sacred rites, the forms of their social organizations and the medicinal powers of plants, he left in some mysterious way, not by the event of death, but for a journey, or by rising to the sky; leaving with them, however, his promise to return at some future day, when they should need him, and he should again become their guide and protector. The interpretation of this fundamental American myth, which I have shown to be the typical religious legend of the race,[60] offers an interesting problem. Comparing it with others of similar form in Egyptian and Aryac antiquity, I have explained it as based on the natural phenomenon of the returning and departing day, as, if not a solar, at least a light myth, developed through personification and etymologic processes. Often the hero-god is identified with some animal, as the raven, the rabbit, the wolf or coyote, the jaguar, the toucan, etc. Possibly in these we may recognize the “totemic animal” after which the gens was named; but in most cases the identification cannot be made.