Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/331

Rh containing fossil bones. They had a multiplicity of inferior deities below the two great powers of Good and Evil, who, there as elsewhere on the American continent, are above all. Each of the lower deities presides over one particular caste or family of Indians, of which he is supposed to have been the creator. "Some make themselves of the caste of the tiger, some of the lion, some of the guanaco, and others of the ostrich, etc. They imagine that these deities have each their separate habitations, in vast caverns under the earth, beneath some lake, hill, etc.; and that when an Indian dies, his soul goes to live with the deity who presides over his particular family, there to enjoy the happiness of being eternally drunk. They believe that their good deities made the world, and that they first created the Indians in their caves, gave them the lance, the bow and arrows, and the stone-bowls to fight and hunt with, and then turned them out to shift for themselves. They imagine that the deities of the Spaniards did the same by them; but that instead of lances, bows, etc., they gave them guns and swords. They suppose that when the beasts, birds, and lesser animals were created, those of the more nimble kind came immediately out of their caves; but that the bulls and cows being the last, the Indians were so frightened at the sight of their horns, that they stopped up the entrance of their caves with great stones. This is the reason they give why they had no black cattle in their country till the Spaniards brought them over, who more wisely had let them out of the caves."

The possibility that the Brazilian belief in the caypor, or wild ape-like being of the woods, may be derived from a recollection of a great extinct ape, has been already mentioned, but there is a circumstance which rather favours the idea of its being a myth, founded on the examination of fossil bones. Like the mammoth and the mastodon, and the creators of the beasts and birds, he is thought to live underground. "They believe he has subterranean campos and hunting grounds in the forest, well stocked with pacas and deer." It is possible, too, that the notion of subterranean animals, who die if they see the