This is the marvellous process that struck the primitive mind. Out of
the Earth rises life, to it it returns. She it is who guards all germs,
nourishes all beings. The Aztecs painted her as a woman with countless
breasts, the Peruvians called her Mama Allpa, _mother_ Earth. _Homo_,
_Adam_, _chamaigen[=e]s_, what do all these words mean but the
earth-born, the son of the soil, repeated in the poetic language of
Attica in _anthropos_, he who springs up as a flower?
The word that corresponds to the Latin _homo_ in American languages has
such singular uniformity in so many of them, that we might be tempted to
regard it as a fragment of some ancient and common tongue, their parent
stem. In the Eskimo it is _inuk_, _innuk_, plural _innuit_; in Athapasca
it is _dinni_, _tenne_; in Algonkin, _inini_, _lenni_, _inwi_; in
Iroquois, _onwi_, _eniha_; in the Otomi of Mexico _n-aniehe_; in the
Maya, _inic_, _winic_, _winak_; all in North America, and the number
might be extended. Of these only the last mentioned can plausibly be
traced to a radical (unless the Iroquois _onwi_ is from _onnha_ life,
_onnhe_ to live).
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