Note 4 — Chapter III · THE RELIGION OF THE IROQUOIS.

The sacrifice of dogs was universal among all the North American Indians; but for a long time it was alluded to as a heathenish custom, without any attempt to understand its import. Cotton Mather speaks of it by saying, “That the Indians, in their wars with us, finding a sore inconvenience by our dogs, sacrificed a dog to the devil, after which no English dog would bark at an Indian for divers months ensuing.” This would imply that the devil had an interpreter, in order to understand the nature of the sacrifice, and the manner of influencing the dog; for the author does not give him the credit of being so thorough a linguist as to understand himself, as appears by the following affirmation.—“Once finding that the dæmons in a possessed young woman understood the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew tongues, my curiosity induced me to make trial of this Indian language, and the dæmons did seem as if they did not understand it.”4 And as the Indians were considered little less than demons themselves, a learned divine was excusable for not attempting to acquaint himself with their language or their character.