244 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



God permitted man to remain on tlie eartli seven or eight liundred 

 years. Then he sent one of his servants to warn him to prepare to 

 go. The man took leave of his family, and serenely started on the 

 journey to the other world. The legends which give the explana- 

 tion of natural phenomena are, as may be imagined, extremely 

 ingenious. Take, for instance, the Suahelian account of the ebb 

 and flow of the tides : " An enormous fish, named Keva, lives under 

 the sea; a great rock stands upon its back, and upon this an enor- 

 mous ox with sixty thousand horns and forty thousand legs. His 

 feet are planted on the rock, his nose rests upon the water, his hair 

 sustains the earth. The animal breathes once a day, and as the 

 volume of his body increases with his inspirations and diminishes 

 with his expirations, so the level of the sea rises and falls." 



African literature is very rich in fables of animals, which may 

 be divided into the two categories of moral apologues and simple 

 narrations. In the former such an identity is noticeable with stories 

 of the peoples of Asia and Europe as almost to cause us to think that 

 both proceed from a common source whence they were drawn in 

 prehistoric times. To this may, however, be opposed the hypothesis 

 of an original and simultaneous origin in different places; a ques- 

 tion for the discussion of which we have not yet all the elements. 

 One of the most brilliant of the African apologues comes from 

 Somaliland, and is perhaps better than the corresponding European 

 fable : " The lion, the hyena, and the fox went a-hunting, and caught 

 a sheep. The lion said, ' Let us divide the prey.' The hyena said, 

 * I will take the hinder parts, the lion the fore parts, and the fox 

 can have the feet and entrails.' Then the lion struck the hyena on 

 the head so hard that one of his eyes fell out, then turned to the 

 fox and said, ' Now you divide it.' ' The head, the intestines, and 

 the feet are for the hyena and me; all the rest belongs to the lion.' 

 ' Who taught you to judge in that way? ' asked the lion. The fox 

 answered, ' The hyena's eye." 



In the second category of animal stories no hidden moral is 

 proposed, but adventures are related corresponding to the character 

 of the animals to which they are attributed. In Africa, as in Eu- 

 rope, the principal cycle is formed of what is called the Romance of 

 the Fox; only there is no complete epic, but merely a number of 

 isolated anecdotes, in which the hero is usually the fox, but some- 

 times the jackal, the hare, or the rabbit. 



In the fables of the Hottentot tribe of the ISTama, the jackal is 

 directly glorified as a national hero, as the incarnation of the race 

 of the Nama, and by his astuteness overcomes all his adversaries, first 

 among which are the wolf and the " man of the white race." It 

 is in place to observe here that when the primitive versions of the 



