hands of the
native hunters. The explanation they offer for this custom gives the key
to the whole theory and practice of preserving the osseous relics of the
dead, as well human as brute. They say that, "the bones contain the
spirits of the slain animals, and that some time in the future they will
rise from the earth, re-clothe themselves with flesh, and stock the
prairies anew."[259-3] This explanation, which comes to us from
indisputable authority, sets forth in its true light the belief of the
red race in a resurrection. It is not possible to trace it out in the
subtleties with which theologians have surrounded it as a dogma. The
very attempt would be absurd. They never occurred to the Indian. He
thought that the soul now enjoying the delights of the happy hunting
grounds would some time return to the bones, take on flesh, and live
again. Such is precisely the much discussed statement that Garcilasso de
la Vega says he often heard from the native Peruvians. He adds that so
careful were they lest any of the body should be lost that they
preserved even the parings of their nails and clippings of the
hair.[260-1] In contradiction to this the writer Acosta has been quoted,
who says that the Peruvians embalmed their dead because they "had no
knowledge that the bodies should rise with the soul."[260-2] But,
rightly understood, this is a confirmation of La Vega's account. Acosta
means that the Christian doctrine of the body rising from the dust being
unknown to the Peruvians (which is perfectly true), they preserved the
body just as it was, so that the soul when it returned to earth, as all
expected, might not be at a loss for a house of flesh.

The notions thus entertained by the red race on the resurrection are
peculiar to it, and stand apart from those of any other. They did not
look for the second life to be either better or worse than the present
one; they regarded it neither as a reward nor a punishment to be sent
back to the world of the living; nor is there satisfactory evidence that
it was ever distinctly connected with a moral or physical theory of the
destiny of the universe, or even with their prevalent expectation of
recurrent epochs in the course of nature. It is true that a writer whose
personal veracity is above all doubt, Mr. Adam Hodgson, relates an
ancient tradition of the Choctaws, to the effect that the present world
will be consumed by a general conflagration, after which it will be
reformed pleasante