among them."[1] Here Sir John Lubbock plainly means to teach, on the authority of Caillie, that the Foulahs were not even fetich-worshipers; that they were positively without any religion of their own. But if he had read Caillie more carefully—read the context as well as the text—he would have discovered that the Foulahs and kindred tribes were idolaters; for that well-known explorer goes on to say: "Wassoula is a country inhabited by idolatrous Foulahs; they carry on little traffic, and never travel; their idolatry would indeed expose them to the most dreadful slavery if they did. . . . They have each several wives, like all other idolaters." It is plain that Caillie here makes a distinction between higher forms of worship and the grosser worship of images. He sought for the higher form of worship, and found no trace of it, but he evidently found the grosser form, or evidence of it. And it was this grosser form of idolatry that made it dangerous for the Foulahs to travel outside of their limits; for, if they had done so, they would have come into contact with Mohammedanism, pledged to the extirpation of idolatry, and in many countries to the enslavement of persistent idolaters.
The same lack of thoroughness in quotation is noticeable in Lubbock's treatment of the testimony of Bates as to the Brazilian Indians. He says, "According to Bates, 'none of the tribes on the upper Amazons have an idea of a Supreme Being, and consequently have no word to express it in their language." This quotation is perfectly correct, but it does not imply what Sir John Lubbock is seeking to prove—namely, that "almost all the savage tribes are entirely without a religion." It simply affirms that Brazilian Indians do not believe in a Supreme Being—an affirmation that might fairly be made with reference to many tribes whose beliefs are very apparent. But in no sense can Bates be quoted as a witness to the absence of religious belief among Brazilian Indians; his testimony runs in the opposite direction. "The mind of the Indian," he writes, "is in a very primitive condition. He has no idea of a Supreme Being, but at the same time he is free from revolting superstitions, his religious notions going no further than belief in an evil spirit, regarded merely as a kind of hobgoblin who is at the bottom of all his failures in fishing, hunting, and so forth."[2] In this testimony the word "hobgoblin" depreciates in our minds the character of this supernatural being, but few if any savages have such a word in their mental vocabulary. Few if any evil spirits worshiped by savages unite in them the clumsiness and trickery of a hobgoblin; their evil, awful spirits are terrors, entering into all as-
