One of the most curious opinions of this people is their belief in the mysterious and sacred character of fire.  They obtain sacred fire, for all national and ecclesiastical purposes, from the flint.  Their national pipes are lighted with this fire.  It is symbolical of purity.  Their notions of the boundary between life and death, which is also symbolically the limit of the material verge between this and a future state, are revealed in connection with the exhibition of flames of fire.  They also make sacrifices by fire of some part of the first fruits of the chase.  These traits are to be viewed, perhaps, in relation to their ancient worship of the sun, above noticed, of which the traditions and belief are still generally preserved.  The existence of the numerous classes of jossakeeds, or mutterers (the word is from the utterance of sounds low on the earth), is a trait that will remind the reader of a similar class of men in early ages in the eastern hemisphere.  These persons constitute, indeed, the Magi of our western forests.

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=_Edward Everett, 1794-1865._= (Manual, pp. 487, 531.)

From “Orations and Speeches.”

=_190._= ASTRONOMY, FOR ALL TIME.

There is much by day to engage the attention of the observatory; the sun, his apparent motions, his dimensions, the spots on his disk (to us the faint indications of movements of unimagined grandeur in his luminous atmosphere), a solar eclipse, a transit of the interior planets, the mysteries of the spectrum—­all phenomena of vast importance and interest.  But night is the astronomer’s accepted time:  he goes to his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest.  A dark pall spreads over the resorts of active life; terrestrial objects, hill and valley, and rock and stream, and the abodes of men, disappear; but the curtain is drawn up which concealed the heavenly hosts.  There they shine and there they move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of Newton and Galileo, of Kepler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus; yea, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.  All has changed on earth; but the glorious heavens remain unchanged.  The plough has passed over the remains of mighty cities, the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic, as he did when his course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star, and constellation, and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love of Him who placed them in the heavens, and upholds them there.

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=_191._= DESCRIPTION OF THE SUNRISE.