The most important question of all in Indian life was communication with divinity, intercourse with the spirits of divine personages." In his _Creation Myths of Primitive America_, this studious author gives the names of a number of divinities, and the legends connected with them.

He affirms positively that "the most striking thing in all savage belief is the low estimate put upon man, when unaided by divine, uncreated power.

In Indian belief every object in the universe is divine except man!" As to their having no priests, no forms of worship, no philosophical conceptions, no historical traditions, no proverbs, any one interested in the Indian of to-day knows that these things are untrue.

Whence came all the myths and legends that recent writers have gathered, a score of which I myself hold still unpublished in my notebook?
Were they all imagined after the arrival of the Mission Fathers?
By no means! They have been handed down for countless centuries, and they come to us, perhaps a little corrupted, but still just as accurate as do the songs of Homer.
Every tribe had its medicine men, who were developed by a most rigorous series of tests; such as would dismay many a white man.

As to their philosophical conceptions and traditions, Curtin well says that in them "we have a monument of thought which is absolutely unequalled, altogether unique in human experience.