Brinton surveys the religious ideas of peoples from the Arctic to Peru: sacred numbers and the four directions, the symbolism of the serpent and the bird, myths of creation and the flood, culture heroes, thunder gods and beliefs about the soul and the afterlife. Its terminology and its theories of race are those of an 1868 scholar.
An early landmark of American anthropology, useful as a source and as a document of its era. Download the free EPUB.