intance with its innumerable
dialects than I possess; but though the gleaning be sparse, it is enough
that I break the ground. Secondly, religious rites are living
commentaries on religious beliefs. At first they are rude
representations of the supposed doings of the gods. The Indian
rain-maker mounts to the roof of his hut, and rattling vigorously a dry
gourd containing pebbles, to represent the thunder, scatters water
through a reed on the ground beneath, as he imagines up above in the
clouds do the spirits of the storm. Every spring in ancient Delphi was
repeated in scenic ceremony the combat of Apollo and the Dragon, the
victory of the lord of bright summer over the demon of chilling winter.
Thus do forms and ceremonies reveal the meaning of mythology, and the
origin of its fables.

Let it not be objected that this proposed method of analysis assumes
that religions begin and develop under the operation of inflexible laws.
The soul is shackled by no fatalism. Formative influences there are,
deep seated, far reaching, escaped by few, but like those which of yore
astrologers imputed to the stars, they potently incline, they do not
coerce. Language, pursuits, habits, geographical position, and those
subtle mental traits which make up the characteristics of races and
nations, all tend to deflect from a given standard the religious life of
the individual and the mass. It is essential to give these due weight,
and a necessary preface therefore to an analysis of the myths of the red
race is an enumeration of its peculiarities, and of its chief families
as they were located when first known to the historian.

Of all such modifying circumstances none has greater importance than the
means of expressing and transmitting intellectual action. The spoken and
the written language of a nation reveal to us its prevailing, and to a
certain degree its unavoidable mode of thought. Here the red race offers
a striking phenomenon. There is no other trait that binds together its
scattered clans, and brands them as members of one great family, so
unmistakably as this of language. From the Frozen Ocean to the Land of
Fire, without a single exception, the native dialects, though varying
infinitely in words, are marked by a peculiarity in construction which
is found nowhere else on the globe,[6-1] and which is so foreign to the
genius of _our_ tongue that it is no easy matter to explain it. It is
called by philologists the _polysynthetic_ cons