Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/243

Rh astonishing, and what people will find it hard to believe, is that they had never seen fire. This so necessary element was entirely unknown to them. They neither knew its use nor its qualities; and they were never more surprised than when they saw it for the first time on the descent that Magellan made on one of their islands, where he burnt some fifty of their houses, to punish these islanders for the trouble they had given him. They at first regarded the fire as a kind of animal which attached itself to the wood on which it fed. The first who came too near it having burnt themselves frightened the rest, and only dared look at it from afar; for fear, they said, of being bitten by it, and lest this terrible animal should wound them by its violent breath," etc. etc. He goes on to tell how they soon got accustomed to it and learnt to use it.

It is a curious illustration of the change in historical criticism that has come since 1700, that the Jesuit historian should have expected so singular a story, not mentioned by the eye-witness who described the discovery, to be received without the production of the slightest evidence, a hundred and eighty years after date, and that the public should have justified his confidence in their credulity by believing and quoting his account. Whether he took it directly from any other book or not I can- not tell; but it is to be observed, that if we add Galvano's story about Los Jardines to Pigafetta's mention of Magalhaens burning the houses of the Ladrone Islanders, we may account for the sources of all Father Le Gobien's story, except the idea of the fire being an animal, which may be supplied out of Herodotus. "By the Egyptians also it hath been held that fire is a living beast, and that it devours everything it can seize, and when filled with food it perishes with what it has devoured."

There are stories of fireless men in America, to which I can only refer. Father Lafitau speaks indefinitely of there being such. Father Lombard, of the Company of Jesus, writing in 1730 from Kourou, in French Guyana, gives an account of the