ird descends from a bear; yet they do not scruple, after
certain expiatory rites, to eat bear's flesh. Other North American
examples are the Kutchin, who have always possessed the system of
totems.(2)

(1) Kip's Jesuits in America i. 33.

(2) Dall's Alaska, pp. 196-198.

It is to be noticed, as a peculiarity of Red Indian totemism which we
have not observed (though it may exist) in Africa, that certain stocks
claim relations with the sun. Thus Pere Le Petit, writing from New
Orleans in 1730, mentions the Sun, or great chief of the Natchez
Indians.(1) The totem of the privileged class among the Natchez was the
sun, and in all myths the sun is regarded as a living being, who can
have children, who may be beaten, who bleeds when cut, and is simply
on the same footing as men and everything else in the world. Precisely
similar evidence comes from South America. In this case our best
authority is almost beyond suspicion. He knew the native languages well,
being himself a half-caste. He was learned in the European learning
of his time; and as a son of the Incas, he had access to all surviving
Peruvian stores of knowledge, and could collect without difficulty the
testimonies of his countrymen. It will be seen(2) that Don Garcilasso
de la Vega could estimate evidence, and ridiculed the rough methods and
fallacious guesses of Spanish inquirers. Garcilasso de la Vega was
born about 1540, being the son of an Inca princess and of a Spanish
conqueror. His book, Commentarias Reales,(3) was expressly intended to
rectify the errors of such Spanish writers as Acosta. In his account of
Peruvian religion, Garcilasso distinguishes between the beliefs of the
tribes previous to the rise of the Inca empire and the sun-worship of
the Incas. But it is plain, from Garcilasso's own account and from other
evidence, that under the Incas the older faiths and fetichisms survived,
in subordination to sun-worship, just as Pagan superstitions survived
in custom and folk-lore after the official recognition of Christianity.
Sun-worship, in Peru, and the belief in a Supreme Creator there, seem
even, like Catholicism in Mexico, China and elsewhere, to have made a
kind of compromise with the lower beliefs, and to have been content
to allow a certain amount of bowing down in the temples of the elder
faiths. According, then, to Garcilasso's account of Peruvian totemism,
"An Indian was not looked upon as honourable unless he was descended
from a fountain,