CHAPTER XIII.
AMERICAN DIVINE MYTHS.
Novelty of the "New World"—Different stages of culture represented there—Question of American Monotheism—Authorities and evidence cited—Myths examined: Eskimo, Ahts, Thlinkeets, Iroquois, the Great Hare—Dr. Brinton's theory of the hare—Zuni myths—Transition to Mexican mythology.
The divine myths of the vast American continent are a topic which a lifetime entirely devoted to the study could not exhaust. At best it is only a sketch in outline that can be offered in a work on the development of mythology in general. The subject is the more interesting as anything like systematic borrowing of myths from the Old World is all but impossible. America, it is true, may have been partially "discovered" many times; there probably have been several points and moments of contact between the New and the Old World. Yet at the time when the Spaniards landed there, and while the first conquests and discoveries were being pursued, the land and the people were to Europeans practically as novel as the races and territories of a strange planet.[1] But the New World only revealed the old stock of humanity in many of its familiar stages of culture, and, conse-
- ↑ Réville, Hibbert Lectures, 1884, p. 8.
