was more particularly manifest, and it thus came of itself to be regarded as a manitto. In such the divinity of the species stood out in its most perfect form, and of such they made their household gods and heraldic insignia; the amulet or talismanic skin, which gave its supernatural aid to the hunter in the chase; and the totem or badge, by which each tribe was distinguished in the great movements of their confederacies.

A badge, or totem, appears to have been adopted in the west by each tribe of the Chippeway, or Algonquin stock, and it may hence be presumed that its use was likewise understood in the east. It seems certain, however, that similar heraldic insignia were used individually, by the principal chiefs and warriors of the New England

The belt of Philip, or Metacom, wrought of wampum, was ornamented with the representations of animals, reminding one of the embossed figures on the shields of the ancient Greeks, and betraying their origin in the operation of similar causes. Not that the Indians derived their usage, directly or indirectly, from the Greeks; but that the human mind in a state of barbarism, spontaneously falls into like habits and customs, and that the Grecian usage was a remnant of the savage state. It is believed that some particular animal often acquired with the Narraganset warrior, as well as with his kindred of the west, such religious importance as to be regarded as his guardian manitto. Such was the case when it had been presented to him by the Great Spirit in a dream, during the ceremony of his initiation as a chief or warrior, and in such cases the representation of the animal would doubtless become the badge of the individual.

Yotaanit, or the manitto of fire, among the Narragansets was a wonderful deity-one of useful and, at the same time, very dangerous attributes. Can it be, said they to Williams, but that this fire is a manitto, or divine power, that out of a stone will arise in a sparkthat will warm us when we are cold, and, if it be angry, will burn our house-yea, if it fall into the dry wood, sets the forest in a blaze, and reduces the country to ashes?

With the Indians, as with all other portions of the human race, the entire humanity, the whole mind, with all its perfections and imperfections, seems to have been reflected into the supernatural. Hence we find not merely the good affections impersonated and carried up to perfection in the supreme Manitto, but the evil propensities, represented as existing in external forms. Therefore, they had a malignant manitto-a being whom they supposed to be the very essence of all evil. His wrath they deprecated, and sought to control by incan

tations and magical rites. It was the practice of these which excited so much horror in our ancestors, and which they called the worship of the devil. It was at the black dance, where the priest, robed in the habiliments of the sorcerer, and perhaps stained a sable hue from crown to waist, led the magic circle, howling his imprecations against the enemy, that our progenitors supposed the prince of darkness exhibited his visible presence. But I will not try the patience of my hearers by a more particular enumeration of their deities. My object is to interrogate the universal principles of human thought and action, and to ascertain from them, if practicable, in what manner their idea of the supernatural originated. I know that we have an abundance of theories to account for its origin. Whenever an author has made the aborigines his theme, he has seldom failed to trace them to an origin in some European or Asiatic people; and, in doing this, it has been convenient to consider the mind of the man of America as perfectly passive-as utterly incapable of originating any thing; and, therefore, as having borrowed all his ideas, particularly on religious subjects, of that parent stock in the old world, from which the author is pleased to trace his descent. I shall occupy what may perhaps be denominated the opposite extreme. I shall hold that he has borrowed little or nothing; that his ideas of the supernatural, however their expression may have been modified by foreign communications, are mainly of the spontaneous growth of the mind, in its nudest and most uncultivated state; and that all the forms and fables of tradition are but diversified modes in which the same great ideas are expressed. In doing this, I shall not disturb him who chooses to believe in a communication to man, by an original divine inspiration, of the idea of the supernatural; but I may go a step farther, and insist that, if it be an inspiration, it is inspiration in its most perfect form-that it is one and the same with that breath which breathed into man a living soul, endowed with all the energies necessary for the future development of the great ideas of supreme intelligence and a future state. We have been, I apprehend, disposed to attribute too little to the effect of the inherent energies of the mind. When we exploded the doctrine of innate ideas, we almost forgot that there were innate faculties-original inherent tendencies, which, under appropriate circumstances, must ever give birth to those very ideas which we had correctly denied to be innate. Is it necessary to school the sportive urchin in geometrical figures, before he can make his circles, his squares, and triangles in the sand? Are these a portion of our traditionary ideas? Must they be taught as we are taught

our creeds? Were the past obliterated from all mind, would not these ideas return of necessity? The truth is, they need no teacher. They are the spontaneous growth of all mind. The same universal reason which impels the bird to build the circle of her nest, and the bee to construct the six angles of its cell, passes through the incipient mind of childhood out into space, where it of necessity sports in geometrical forms; and the same rational principle, which thus puts on the relations of space, does, when it passes into the mysterious and sublime, in like manner resolve itself into ideas of the supernatural— the only ideas appropriate to the region into which it has passed. Tradition is secondary-it comes to its aid-it assists it with a language; but it does nothing more.

What then were the essential elements of the idea designated by the term manitto-a term which we have translated God, or Spirit. From the manner in which this term is invariably used, it seems to be palpable that it signified a vital power, property, or energy, which acted from, and resided within, an external manifestation-as the soul in the body-a self-subsisting and self-acting cause, lying beyond the grasp of the Indian's senses, and exciting his wonder and admiration. Action within him he felt proceeded from a vital, voluntary, and conscious cause; and when he witnessed what appeared to be self-action elsewhere, he necessarily ascribed to it a like vital, voluntary and conscious agent. He came to this result by no labored train of metaphysical reasoning, but by the spontaneous movement of the mind. Infancy never witnesses motion, but that it involuntarily ascribes to it an intelligent cause. It is a primitive judgment of the mind, formed without an effort, and of which it loses sight only after repeatedly discovering that all effects are constantly resolvable into causes, which in turn are but effects of causes still higher.

But in the unenlightened mind of the savage, a great number of these primitive judgments necessarily remain unchanged. What knows he of the causes which produce the flux and reflux of the sea? Who has informed him of the action of gravitation upon the air, and of the effects of various temperatures in producing the tempest and the whirlwind? Who has rendered him familiar with the electric fluid, so as to take from the peal of thunder and the flash of lightning the special manifestations of an angry God? Who has placed in his hand the telescope, and thereby robbed the heavens of his deities? But so long as these primitive judgments remain unchanged, he is forced to regard the ocean, the tempest, the lightning, and the heavenly bodies,

as forms animated by intelligences their own, and as beings vastly superior to the awe-stricken mortal who contemplates them.

Let us for a moment look at nature with the eye of one of these her uninstructed children, and we shall the better understand the conceptions which her energies excite. To his mind the earth is a circle of but a few days' journey over-ridged, indeed, with mountains, cloven with rivers, and beaten by the never-ceasing waves of the ocean; but still a circle of very limited dimensions. His view is shut in on every side by the encircling horizon, whilst the blue vault of heaven, proportionally defined, closes over him, and confines his range of thought to an universe as limited as the apparent scope of his vision. The sun, the moon, and the stars, are only greater and lesser lights, moving in their circuits, and alternately appearing and disappearing as if endowed with a life their own. All around him is likewise motion. The rivers are hastening to the sea; the ocean, whether in tempest or in calm, is never still, and breeze or storm is constantly sweeping the bosom of the forest. If he pauses for a moment, and looks within himself, he finds all in motion there; he feels the greater and lesser motions-the pulsations of the heart and the wrist, and the heaving of the breast-and then those general and all-controlling motions which proceed from the dictates of the will. Of all this he is conscious and without reasoning, or pausing to theorize, he feels that the universal agitation around him has, like that within him, a voluntary or intelligent principle, soul, or ruling manitto; and that the heaving of the great deep and the rush of the torrent, like the heaving of his breast and the pulsation of his heart, have each a separate soul, manitto, or intelligent principle of action. Thus all around, as well as all within him, has life. 'Tis as if he had found a vast duplicate of himself in the universe which he is contemplating-as if his whole being had swollen to the dimensions of the universal frame-till, in contemplating the stupendous wonder into which his existence seems to be resolved, he loses the consciousness of his own little individuality, and involuntarily worships the dread Supernatural, into whose presence he is thus mysteriously drawn. He salutes the power which rules the whole, and calls it the Supreme Manitto, or Great Spirit; whilst he hails those powers which manifest themselves in the parts of the universal frame as subordinate manittos, and assigns to them appropriate names.

Thus the Indian did not come to his knowledge of the supernatural by a process of reasoning, but in a much shorter way-he felt it; and when reason required him to account for the formation of the

universe, and for his own creation, he found his faith already in possession of that which was able to satisfy her demands.

Though our aborigines were thus surrounded with their deities— though they breathed the air of the supernatural-though it mingled with all their feasts, and dances, and public ceremonies, yet it was not on every occasion that its idea was present in its most imposing form. Some deep emotion, combined with a sense of the mysterious, was ever necessary to bring out an expression of an elevated religious feeling. The sentiment of the sublime is closely allied to the perception of the supernatural. Who is there, that has cast his eye from some promontory that overlooks the boundless expanse of ocean, and beheld the vast mass of moving waters, that has not felt the presence of the invisible power that moves them? Who is there that has paused over the brink of Niagara, and beheld its whole western world of waters descending like the ruin of a universe, that has not felt his own being expand with the ingatherings of mysterious thought, until he caught something more than a mere glimpse of the power that presided over and gave its energy to the soul-engrossing wonder? Such scenes draw deeply on the heart, and touch that part of human nature, whether in savage or civilized man, that approximates the divinity within. It is the attempt to give outward expression to these feelings that induces the voice and attitude of adoration, and the ceremonials of sacrifice.

When the young prince of the Winnebagoes, who accompanied Carver on his visit to the falls of St. Anthony, beheld that stupendous cascade, he recognized in the sublimity of the spectacle the presence of the Great Spirit, and began to address him in an audible voice. "He then threw his pipe into the stream; then the roll that contained his tobacco; after these the bracelets that he wore on his wrists; next an ornament that encircled his neck, composed of beads and wires; and at last the ear-rings from his ears-in short, he presented his god every part of his dress that was valuable. During the ceremony he frequently smote his breast with great violence, threw his arms about, and appeared to be much agitated." Who is there that does not see in this the expansion of a mysterious sentiment, spontaneously seeking, by every possible avenue, to establish a communication between itself and the Being who inspires it? Who is there that does not recognize in it the original language of devotion, that comes because it must, and comes in every form it can? And who, after witnessing such an instance, can think of finding in the customs of a more civi