[Footnote 1:  “Ilium quoque pollicitum fuisse, se aliquando has regiones revisurum.”  Father Nobrega, ubi supra.  For the other particulars I have given see Nicolao del Techo, Historia Provinciae Paraquariae, Lib. vi, cap. iv, “De D. Thomae Apostoli itineribus;” and P. Antonio Ruiz, Conquista Espiritual hecha por los Religiosos de la Compania de Jesus en las Provincias del Paraguay, Parana, Uruguay y Tape, fol. 29, 30 (4to., Madrid, 1639).  The remarkable identity of the words relating to their religious beliefs and observances throughout this widespread group of tribes has been demonstrated and forcibly commented on by Alcide D’Orbigny, L’Homme Americain, vol. ii, p. 277.  The Vicomte de Porto Seguro identifies Zume with the Cemi of the Antilles, and this etymology is at any rate not so fanciful as most of those he gives in his imaginative work, L’Origine Touranienne des Americaines Tupis-Caribes, p. 62 (Vienna, 1876).]

I have not yet exhausted the sources from which I could bring evidence of the widespread presence of the elements of this mythical creation in America.  But probably I have said enough to satisfy the reader on this point.  At any rate it will be sufficient if I close the list with some manifest fragments of the myth, picked out from the confused and generally modern reports we have of the religions of the Athabascan race.  This stem is one of the most widely distributed in North America, extending across the whole continent south of the Eskimos, and scattered toward the warmer latitudes quite into Mexico.  It is low down in the intellectual scale, its component tribes are usually migratory savages, and its dialects are extremely synthetic and of difficult phonetics, requiring as many as sixty-five letters for their proper orthography.  No wonder, therefore, that we have but limited knowledge of their mental life.

Conspicuous in their myths is the tale of the Two Brothers.  These mysterious beings are upon the earth before man appears.  Though alone, they do not agree, and the one attacks and slays the other.  Another brother appears on the scene, who seems to be the one slain, who has come to life, and the two are given wives by the Being who was the Creator of things.  These two women were perfectly beautiful, but invisible to the eyes of mortals.  The one was named, The Woman of the Light or The Woman of the Morning; the other was the Woman of Darkness or the Woman of Evening.  The brothers lived together in one tent with these women, who each in turn went out to work.  When the Woman of Light was at work, it was daytime; when the Woman of Darkness was at her labors, it was night.

In the course of time one of the brothers disappeared and the other determined to select a wife from one of the two women, as it seems he had not yet chosen.  He watched what the Woman of Darkness did in her absence, and discovered that she descended into the waters and enjoyed the embraces of a monster, while the Woman of Light passed her time in feeding white birds.  In course of time the former brought forth black man-serpents, while the Woman of Light was delivered of beautiful boys with white skins.  The master of the house killed the former with his arrows, but preserved the latter, and marrying the Woman of Light, became the father of the human race, and especially of the Dene Dindjie, who have preserved the memory of him.[1]