[283] "Avant d'avoir l'usage des moulins, ils brisaient leurs grains dans les piles, ou des mortiers de bois, avec des pilons de même matière. Hésiode nous donne la mesure de la pile et du pilon des anciens, et de nos sauvages, dans ces paroles, 'Coupez moi une pile de trois pieds de haut, et un pilon de la longueur de trois coudées.' (Hesiod, Opera et Dies, lib. v., 411; Servius in lib. ix., Æneid. Init.) Caton met aussi la pile et le pilon, au nombre des meubles rustiques de son temps. Les Pisons prirent leur nom de cette manière de piler le bled."—Lafitau.
[284] "Il leur suffit d'un morceau de bois recourbé de trois doigts de largeur, attaché à un long mouche qui leur sert à sarcler la terre, et à la remuer legèrement."—Lafitau, tom. ii., p. 76.
Catlin says that the tribe of Mandans raise a great deal of corn. This is all done by the women, who make their hoes of the shoulder-blades of the buffalo or elk, and dig the ground over instead of plowing it, which is consequently done with a vast deal of labor.—Vol. i., p. 121.
[285] "Nothing so distinctly marks the uncivilized condition of the North American Indian as his total ignorance of the art of metallurgy. Forged iron has been in use among the inhabitants of our hemisphere from time immemorial; for, though the process employed for obtaining the malleability of a metal in its malleable state is very complicated, yet M. de Marian has clearly proved that the several eras at which writers have pretended to fix the discovery are entirely fabulous."—Lettres sur la Chine.
Consequently the weapons of brass and other instruments of metal found in the dikes of Upper Canada, Florida, &c., are among the strongest indications of the superiority of those ancient races of America who have now entirely passed away.
"Know, then," says Cotton Mather, "that these doleful creatures are the veriest ruins of mankind. They live in a country full of metals, but the Indians were never owners of so much as a knife till we came among them. Their name for an Englishman was 'knife-man.'"
[286] Chateaubriand, vol. i., p. 233; Charlevoix.
"The dances of the Red Indians form a singular and important feature throughout the customs of the aborigines of the New World. In these are typified, by signs well understood by the initiated, and, as it were, by hieroglyphic action, their historical events, their projected enterprises, their hunting, their ambuscades, and their battles, resembling in some respects the Pyrrhic dances of the ancients."—Washington Irving's Columbus, vol. ii., p. 122.
"In the province of Pasto, on the ridge of the Cordillera, I have seen masked Indians, armed with rattles, performing savage dances around the altar, while a Franciscan monk elevated the host."—Humboldt's Nouveau Espagne, vol. i., p. 411.
See, also, Lafitau's Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains comparés aux mœurs des premiers temps, tom. i., p. 526. He refers to Plutarch, in Lycurgo, for an account of similar Spartan dances.