It is a great pity that the student of American history is so often limited in his investigations in this country, by the lack of material.

It is sad to think that such an opulent and intelligent land does not possess a single complete library of its own history.] The king of the Tarascos was considered merely the vicegerent of the absent hero-god, and ready to lay down the sceptre when Curicaberis should return to earth.
We do not know whether the myth of the Four Brothers prevailed among the Tarascos; but there is hardly a nation on the continent among whom the number Four was more distinctly sacred.

The kingdom was divided into four parts (as also among the Itzas, Qquichuas and numerous other tribes), the four rulers of which constituted, with the king, the sacred council of five, in imitation, I can hardly doubt, of the hero-god, and the four deities of the winds.
The goddess of water and the rains, the female counterpart of Curicaberis, was the goddess _Cueravaperi_.

"She is named," says the authority I quote, "in all their fables and speeches.

They say that she is the mother of all the gods of the earth, and that it is she who bestows the harvests and the germination of seeds." With her ever went four attendant goddesses, the personifications of the rains from the four cardinal points.