this strange belief that Du Chaillu asserts exists
among the African warriors: "_The charmed leopard's skin worn about the
warrior's middle is supposed to render that worthy spear-proof._"

Let us now take a brief retrospective glance at the FACTS mentioned in
the foregoing pages. They seem to teach us that, in ages so remote as to
be well nigh lost in the abyss of the past, the _Mayas_ were a great and
powerful nation, whose people had reached a high degree of civilization.
That it is impossible for us to form a correct idea of their
attainments, since only the most enduring monuments, built by them, have
reached us, resisting the disintegrating action of time and atmosphere.
That, as the English of to-day, they had colonies all over the earth;
for we find their name, their traditions, their customs and their
language scattered in many distant countries, among whose inhabitants
they apparently exercised considerable civilizing influence, since they
gave names to their gods, to their tribes, to their cities.

We cannot doubt that the colonists carried with them the old traditions
of the mother country, and the history of the founders of their
nationality; since we find them in the countries where they seem to have
established large settlements soon after leaving the land of their
birth. In course of time these traditions have become disfigured,
wrapped, as it were, in myths, creations of fanciful and untutored
imaginations, as in Hindostan: or devises of crafty priests, striving to
hide the truth from the ignorant mass of the people, fostering their
superstitions, in order to preserve unbounded and undisputed sway over
them, as in Egypt.

In Hindostan, for example, we find the Maya custom of carrying the
children astride on the hips of the nurses. That of recording the vow of
the devotees, or of imploring the blessings of deity by the imprint of
the hand, dipped in red liquid, stamped on the walls of the shrines and
palaces. The worship of the mastodon, still extant in India, Siam,
Burmah, as in the worship of _Ganeza_, the god of knowledge, with an
elephant head, degenerated in that of the elephant itself.

Still extant we find likewise the innate propensity of the Mayas to
exclude all foreigners from their country; even to put to death those
who enter their territories (as do, even to-day, those of Santa Cruz and
the inhabitants of the Tierra de Guerra) as the emissaries of Rama were
informed by the friend of the