lt convinced that if the
reason for its adoption could be discovered, much of the apparent
confusion which reigns among them would be dispelled.

Such a reason must take its rise from some essential relation of man to
nature, everywhere prominent, everywhere the same. It is found in the
_adoration of the cardinal points_.

The red man, as I have said, was a hunter; he was ever wandering through
pathless forests, coursing over boundless prairies. It seems to the
white race not a faculty, but an instinct that guides him so unerringly.
He is never at a loss. Says a writer who has deeply studied his
character: "The Indian ever has the points of the compass present to his
mind, and expresses himself accordingly in words, although it shall be
of matters in his own house."[67-1]

The assumption of precisely four cardinal points is not of chance; it is
recognized in every language; it is rendered essential by the anatomical
structure of the body; it is derived from the immutable laws of the
universe. Whether we gaze at the sunset or the sunrise, or whether at
night we look for guidance to the only star of the twinkling thousands
that is constant to its place, the anterior and posterior planes of our
bodies, our right hands and our left coincide with the parallels and
meridians. Very early in his history did man take note of these four
points, and recognizing in them his guides through the night and the
wilderness, call them his gods. Long afterwards, when centuries of slow
progress had taught him other secrets of nature--when he had discerned
in the motions of the sun, the elements of matter, and the radicals of
arithmetic a repetition of this number--they were to him further
warrants of its sacredness. He adopted it as a regulating quantity in
his institutions and his arts; he repeated it in its multiples and
compounds; he imagined for it novel applications; he constantly
magnified its mystic meaning; and finally, in his philosophical
reveries, he called it the key to the secrets of the universe, "the
source of ever-flowing nature."[68-1]

In primitive geography the figure of the earth is a square plain; in the
legend of the Quiche's it is "shaped as a square, divided into four
parts, marked with lines, measured with cords, and suspended from the
heavens by a cord to its four corners and its four sides."[68-2] The
earliest divisions of territory were in conformity to this view. Thus it
was with ancient Egypt, Syria, Mesopo