THE ASTRONOMY OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. 623 



races perceive in the bones of tlie mammoth, so often found in their 

 country, evidences of the real existence of underground monsters, 

 whose movements may give rise to earthquakes. According to Liv- 

 ingstone, the natives of Magomoro relate that once when an earth- 

 quake occurred, by which rocks were thrown down from the mountains, 

 the wise men of the country got together, and conchided that a star 

 had fallen into the sea, and the consequent swelling of the waves had 

 caused commotions over the whole earth. 



Most of the astronomical conceptions of our Polynesian, African, 

 and American brothers are childishly simple and crude enough, but at 

 the same time curious. A very odd belief is that of the Namaqua 

 Plottentots that the sun is a piece of bright bacon, which the people 

 who go in ships draw up in the evening by enchantment, and let down 

 again after they have cut a piece off from it. The Polynesians say 

 that the god Maui holds the sun and regulates his course by means of 

 a rope. In the beginning he hurt the star in catching it and deprived 

 it of half its light, and since then the days have been longer and cooler, 

 and men have been able to work in peace. The Japanese myths fable 

 eight hundred thousand gods holding the sun with a rope, while it is 

 all the time trying to get back into the cave out of which they have 

 drawn it by means of a trick. The Society-Islanders have a story that 

 the sun goes into the sea at night ; it plunges in and is extinguished 

 with a great hissing that can be heard away off in the west. And this 

 recalls a story that is mentioned by Strabo. According to Bock, the 

 Dyaks have a myth that the sun and the moon were made by the 

 Almighty out of a peculiar clay which is found on the earth, but is 

 very rare and costly, the vessels made from which, called gvji blanga, 

 are holy and protect against evil spirits. The settling of the sun's 

 red disk upon the mountain-tops and its final descent behind the hills 

 engaged the attention of dwellers in the regions where the phenomena 

 assumed that character ; and the Karens of Burmah and the mountain 

 tribes of America spoke of the sun going down into a deep cleft in 

 the rocks. 



In passing over to the numerous myths in which the sun is re- 

 garded as a living being, we meet the belief of the Navajos that it is 

 newly set in the sky every morning by a woman. Next, we come to 

 a great number of stories that personify the sun, although they may 

 not make a god of it, and represent its setting as a process of being 

 swallowed by some monster. Sometimes it is a hero, sometimes it is 

 a virgin, which is thus swallowed and afterward released or rejected, 

 as in the Greek stories of Perseus and Andromeda and Hercules and 

 Hesione, the old Norse story of Eireck and the Dragon, and the Teu- 

 tonic myths of Little Red Riding-hood and the Wolf and of the Seven 

 Little Goats. 



Without going into the discussion of sun-worship, of which so 

 much has been written, we may refer to the wide diffusion of the 



