It was partly through pioneer study of the Siouan Indians that the popular fallacy concerning the aboriginal "Great Spirit" gained currency; and it was partly through the work of Dorsey among the ¢egiha and Dakota tribes, first as a missionary and afterward as a linguist, that the early error was corrected. Among these tribes the creation and control of the world and the things thereof are ascribed to "wa-kan-da" (the term varying somewhat from tribe to tribe), just as among the Algonquian tribes omnipotence was assigned to "ma-ni-do" ("Manito the Mighty" of "Hiawatha"); yet inquiry shows that wakanda assumes various forms, and is rather a quality than a definite entity. Thus, among many of the tribes the sun is wakanda—not _the_ wakanda or _a_ wakanda, but simply wakanda; and among the same tribes the moon is wakanda, and so is thunder, lightning, the stars, the winds, the cedar, and various other things; even a man, especially a shaman, might be wakanda or a wakanda. In addition the term was applied to mythic monsters of the earth, air, and waters; according to some of the sages the ground or earth, the mythic under-world, the ideal upper-world, darkness, etc, were wakanda or wakandas. So, too, the fetiches and the ceremonial objects and decorations were wakanda among different tribes. Among some of the groups various animals and other trees besides the specially wakanda cedar were regarded as wakandas; as already noted, the horse, among the prairie tribes, was the wakanda dog. In like manner many natural objects and places of striking character were considered wakanda. Thus the term was applied to all sorts of entities and ideas, and was used (with or without inflectional variations) indiscriminately as substantive and adjective, and with slight modification as verb and adverb. Manifestly a term so protean is not susceptible of translation into the more highly differentiated language of civilization. Manifestly, too, the idea expressed by the term is indefinite, and can not justly be rendered into "spirit," much less into "Great Spirit;" though it is easy to understand stand how the superficial inquirer, dominated by definite spiritual concept, handicapped by unfamiliarity with the Indian tongue, misled by ignorance of the vague prescriptorial ideation, and perhaps deceived by crafty native informants or mischievous interpreters, came to adopt and perpetuate the erroneous interpretation. The term may be translated into "mystery" perhaps more satisfactorily than into any other single English word, yet this rendering is at the same time much too limited and much too definite. As used by the Siouan Indian, wakanda vaguely connotes also "power," "sacred," "ancient," "grandeur," "animate," "immortal," and other words, yet does not express with any degree of fullness and clearness the ideas conveyed by these terms singly or collectively—indeed, no English sentence of reasonable length can do justice to the aboriginal idea