334 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. VI. 
The conquering of night and the bringing of day are tasks which the 
heroes of folk-tale and myth accomplish in a thousand differing ways. 
It is, however, a very common belief among primitive peoples that in 
the beginning it was altogether night or continual day, and it is a most 
interesting fact that so many of the lower races, the American Indians 
especially, fable that the present alternation of light and darkness is due 
to some chance-game of the gods, some celestial gambling in which day 
and night were the stakes, the result being usually a compromise. In 
the bringing of light or the keeping of darkness, the culture-animals and 
birds largely figure. 
It was eternal night, say the Polynesians, until sky was riven asunder 
from earth and the broad daylight streamed through. Mankind, accord- 
ing to the legends of many primitive peoples, dwelt in the beginning in 
gloomy caves, or subterranean worlds, whence by sudden emergence, or ~ 
by slow passage from stage to stage they reached the realm of light. 
The dawn-myths and the dawn-lore of all races of men are of intense 
interest and even among savage races often of incomparable beauty. 
The morning-red, the first beams of the returning sun, have been glorified 
by untold thousands of folk-poets of whom no remembrance but the 
word they coined now survives. The Quiché Indians of Guatemala say 
for “it is beginning to dawn,” ca xaguin vuch, 2.e., “now the opossum 
spreads his legs” ; the Delaware machka jappan is the exact equivalent 
of the familiar “the sky is ruddy in the East”; the Algonkian pzta-ban 
“the ruddy light is coming this way,” really sums up the lines of 
Horatio in Hamlet: 
‘Look, the morn in russet mantle clad, 
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.” 
Very primitive peoples speak as we do of “the dawn of intelligence,” 
for all over the world light and knowledge have been deemed to be like 
or even one and the same thing. 
The Omaha Indians have expressed this idea very beautifully indeed 
in their puberty-lore. 
Some of the sterner and more exciting of the operations of Nature 
have appealed to the primitive mind, even when least expected. Of the 
Mojos Indians of Bolivia, Herndon (Amazons, Vol. I1., p. 237) tells us : 
“ The Mojos Indians have a natural fondness for painting the human 
figures and representing birds and animals, particularly the common 
chicken and the cow. The latter seems to have madea deep impression 
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