CREATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD. 397 



sions, as a punishment for which a flood rises ; and it is 

 only by embarking not in ordinary vessels that cer- 

 tain people save their lives, afterwards to become the 

 progenitors of a powerful race. But there is one essen- 

 tial difference. Whilst Noah and his family were saved 

 Deo volentc, the Fijian transgressors effected their escape 

 notwithstanding Degei was resolved upon their destruc- 

 tion. Williams adds, that in all, eight persons were 

 saved, and that two tribes of people became extinct, 

 one of them distinguished by a tail like that of a dog.* 



As the Fijians believe in the creation, so they be- 

 lieve in the ultimate destruction, of the world. This 

 appears incidentally from their tradition of the Daiya, 

 a species of Amorphopliallus, the foliage of which con- 

 sists of a single leaf, supported on a stalk two to four 

 feet long, and spreading out somewhat like an um- 

 brella. In the cosmogony of the Samoans, the office of 

 having, by means of its single foliage, pushed up the 

 heavens when they emerged from chaos, is assigned to 

 this plant, and the Fijians recommend it as a safe place 

 of refuge when the end of the world approaches, the 

 Daiga being a " vasu " to heaven (Vasu ki lagi : see 

 p. 304). 



The immortality of the soul, and a life hereafter, is 



are sacred. The spirits of the dead are said to throw a whale's tooth at 

 these trees, that their wives may be strangled. When a shock of an 

 earthquake is felt, Degei is turning himself. This, and a few other little 

 things, are not in the original. 



* The existence of savage tribes of people with a tail, somewhere in 

 Africa, has as a popular belief been frequently alluded to in the newspapers. 

 Dr. Kieser, the President of the Imperial Academy of Germany, has made 

 numerous inquiries about them ; and when Heuglin set out in search of 

 Edward Vogel, his attention was particularly directed to this singular topic. 



