X.] THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 381 



stealing back to the tree, kindled a fire into which he thre\v the 

 charmed bundle. On his return to the hut, there was his dying 

 brother, who knew what had happened, and said he must die 

 unless there was time to get him a bit of the skin. So his pitying 

 companion was off and back in all haste with an unburnt scrap 

 snatched from the embers, which the moribund eagerly seizing 

 threw over his shoulders and was in a flash again a jaguar, 

 which with a mighty bound sprang from the hut and was seen 



no more 1 . 



Returning to the north, Franz Boas 2 shows that the folklore 

 of the North-west Indians has spread over wide spaces by borrow- 

 ings and migrations. Thus a group of myths, in which the raven 

 plays the chief part as creator, etc., was originally confined to the 

 Thlinkits and neighbouring Haidas and Tsimshians, but spread 

 later to the Columbia river peoples, though picking up foreign 

 elements on the way. By following the track of such myths, 

 light may often be thrown on the migrations of the tribes them- 

 selves, as in the case of the Tsimshians, who have so little 

 influenced their present neighbours that their arrival on the coast 

 must be regarded as of relatively recent date. 



On the Atlantic side of the continent we seem to enter a 

 different mythological world, and here it may be readily admitted 

 that Mr Charles G. Leland has shown direct contact between the 

 Norse legends and those of the East Algonquian tribes (Micmacs, 

 Penobscots, Passamaquoddies) 3 . " Lox," the wolverine, may not 

 be an Indian word, but his misdeeds bear too great a resemblance 

 to those of Loki to be explained away as mere coincidences. To 

 account, however, for these and many other identities of thought 

 and sentiment we need but recall what has been stated of the long 

 sojourn of the Norsemen in Greenland, of their southern expedi- 

 tions to Hvitramannaland, and of the former range of the Eskimos 

 as far as New England, overlapping and undoubtedly intermingling 



1 J. B. Ambrosetti, La Legenda del Yagiiarete-Aba, in Anales de la 

 Sociedad Cientifica Argentina, 1896, vol. 41, p. 321. 



VerhandL Berlin. Ges.f. Anthrop. etc. 1895, p. 487 sq. ; also Indianische 

 Sagen vonder Nord-Pacifischen Kiiste Amerika's, Berlin, 1895, p. 329 sq. ; and 

 Social Organization, etc., p. 660 sq. 



3 The Algonquian Legends of New England, etc. 1884. 



