V. The Tupi-Guarani have one word only to express all the varieties of love known to them—­aihu.  Dr. Brinton thinks he “cannot be far wrong” in deriving this from ai, self, or the same, and hu to find or be present; and from this he infers that “to love,” in Guarani, means “to find oneself in another,” or “to discover in another a likeness to oneself.”  I submit that this is altogether too airy a fabric of fanciful conjecture to allow the inference that the sentiment of love was known to these Brazilian Indians, whose morals and customs were, moreover, as we have seen, fatal obstacles to the growth of refined sexual feeling.  Both the Tupis and Guaranis were cannibals, and they had no regard for chastity.  One of their “sentimental” customs was for a captor to make his prisoner, before he was eaten, cohabit with his (the captor’s) sister or daughter, the offspring of this union being allowed to grow up and then was devoured too, the first mouthful being given to the mother. (Southey, I., 218.) I mention this because Dr. Brinton says that the evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among these tribes “is corroborated by the incidents we learn of their domestic life.”

[246] U.S.  Geogr. and Geol Survey Rocky Mt.  Region, Pt.  I., 181-89.

[247] It is of the Modocs of this region that Joaquin Miller wrote that “Indians have their loves, and as they have but little else, these fill up most of their lives.”  The above poems indicate the quality of this Indian love.  In Joaquin Miller’s narrative of his experience with the Modocs, the account of his own marriage is of special interest.  At a Modoc marriage a feast is given by the girl’s father, “to which all are invited, but the bride and bridegroom do not partake of food. ...  Late in the fall, the old chief made the marriage feast, and at that feast neither I nor his daughter took meat, or any part.”  It is a pity that the rest of this writer’s story is, by his own confession, part romance, part reality.  A lifelike description of his Modoc experience would have done more to ensure immortality for his book than any amount of romancing.

[248] Journal of Amer.  Folklore, 1888, 220-26.

[249] Internat.  Archiv. fur Ethnogr., Supplement zu Bd. IX. 1896, pp. 1-6.

[250] These lines by their fervid eroticism quite suggest the existence of a masculine Indian Sappho.  See the comments on Sappho in the chapter on Greek love.

[251] Such a procedure does well enough if the object is to amuse idle readers; and when a writer confesses, as Cornelius Mathews did in the Indian Fairy Book, that he bestowed on the stories “such changes as similar legends most in vogue in other countries have received to adapt them to the comprehension and sympathy of general readers,” no harm is done.  But for scientific purposes it is necessary to sift down all alleged Indian stories and poems to the solid bed-rock of facts.  It is significant that in