Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/72

60 the sickness. But others besides the medicine-man can remove evil by the breathing or sucking process. Spruce mentions Indians sucking each other's shoulders as a cure for rheumatism, and I have often known an old woman breathe over forbidden food, to remove the 'poison' and make it permissible to eat. They will breathe over a delicate child in the same way, to improve its health.

Dr. von Martins considered the savage state of the Forest Indians to be the result of degradation, a theory recently advanced with regard to these identical tribes in the Contemporary Review for September, 1912. For my part I agree with Dr. Tylor "that Dr. Martins' deduction is the absolute reverse of the truth," and regard this theory as erroneous. I saw nothing to suggest degeneration. On the contrary, it appears to me that, in spite of the awful handicap of environment, these tribes are probably evolving a higher life.

I found no traces of the existence of any submerged superior civilization, but much to show that these people have not yet emerged from practically the Stone Age. There is no metal in the country but what filters in by barter and is employed for ornaments,—mostly Peruvian and Chilian dollars and empty cartridge cases. There is also no stone. Metal tools or weapons are unknown. They have only wood, and stone axes. The latter they look upon as of almost divine origin, and have handed down, they know not from whence, generation by generation. They have not learnt to produce fire, and have no knowledge of the potter's wheel, nor of the spindle. Thread they make from palm fibre, rolled on the naked thigh. Beaten bark cloth is their only material. Ligatures are made with finger-work only, in plaiting of an extraordinary fineness. Hammocks are knotted. Baskets, mats, cassava-squeezers, and other bark-fibre articles are plaited. Yet with their primitive tools, a stone axe, wooden knife,