"
So great was the filial respect for these remains by the Indians, that
on the Mississippi, in Peru, and elsewhere, no tyranny, no cruelty, so
embittered the indigenes against the white explorers as the sacrilegious
search for treasures perpetrated among the sepulchres of past
generations. Unable to understand the meaning of such deep feeling, so
foreign to the European who, without a second thought, turns a cemetery
into a public square, or seeds it down in wheat, the Jesuit missionaries
in Paraguay accuse the natives of worshipping the skeletons of their
forefathers,[257-1] and the English in Virginia repeated it of the
Powhatans.
The question has been debated and variously answered, whether the art of
mummification was known and practised in America. Without entering into
the discussion, it is certain that preservation of the corpse by a long
and thorough process of exsiccation over a slow fire was nothing
unusual, not only in Peru, Popoyan, the Carib countries, and Nicaragua,
but among many of the tribes north of the Gulf of Mexico, as I have
elsewhere shown.
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