52 



• KNOWLEDGE ^ 



[Jan. 2G, U 



charms as protectivea against the ovil-disposcd and thoso 

 in league with the devil, and as cures for divers diseases, is 

 obvious. But upon this it is not needful to dwell ; what 

 has lieen said will suffice to show that the superstitious man 

 is on the same plane as tlu^ savage, hut, save in rare 

 instances, without such excuse for remaining, as Jlishop 

 Hall puts it, with "old wives and starres as his counsellors, 

 charms as his physicians, and a little hallowed wax as his 

 antidote for all evils." 



But we have travelled in brief space a long way from 

 our picture of primitive man, weaving out of streams and 

 breezes and the sunshine his crude philosophy of personal 

 life and will controlling all, to the peasant of to-day, his 

 intellectual lineal descendant, with his belief in signs and 

 wonders, his forecast of fate and future by omens, by 

 dreams, and by such pregnant occurrences as the spilling 

 of salt, the howling of dogs, and changes of the moon — in 

 short, by the great mass of superstitions which yet more or 

 less influence the intelligent, terrorize the ignorant, and 

 delight the student of human development. 



As, however, a good deal hinges upon the evidences in 

 savage myth-making of the personification of the powers of 

 nature, we must return to this for awhile. Obviously, 

 the richest and most suggestive material would be 

 supplied by the striking phenomena of the heavens, 

 chiefly in sunrise and sunset, in moon, star, star-group, 

 and meteor, cloud and storm, and, next in importance, by 

 the strange and terrible among phenomena on earth, 

 whether in the restless waters, the unquiet trees, the 

 grotesquely-shaped rooks, and the fear inspired in man by 

 creatures more powerful than himself. Though the whole 

 range of the lower culture, sun, moon, and constellations 

 are spoken of as living creatures, often as ancestors, heroes, 

 and benefactors who have departed to the country above, to 

 heaven, the heaved, up-lifted land. The Tongans of the 

 South Pacific say that two ancestors quarrelled respecting the 

 parentage of the first-born of the woman Papa, each claim- 

 ing the child as his own. No King Solomon appears to 

 have been concerned in the dispute, although at last the 

 infant was cut in two. Vatea, the husband of Papa, took 

 the upper part as his share, and forthwith squeezed it into 

 a ball and tossed it into the heavens, where it became 

 the sun. Tonga-iti sullenly allowed the lower half 

 to remain a day or two on the ground. But seeing 

 the brightness of Vatea's half, he compressed his share 

 into a ball and tossed it into the dark sky, during the 

 absence of the sun in the nether world. Thus ori- 

 ginated the moon, whose paleness is owing to the 

 blood having all drained out of Tonga-iti's half as it lay 

 upon the ground. Mr. Gill, from whose valuable col- 

 lection of southern myth this is quoted, says that it seems 

 to have its origin in the allegory of an alternating embrace 

 of the fair Earth by Day and Night. But despite the 

 explanations, more or less strained, which some schools of 

 comparative mythologists find for every myth, the savage 

 is not a conscious weaver of allegories, or an embryo 

 Cabalist, and we shall find ourselves more in accord with 

 the laws of his intellectual growth if, instead of delving 

 for recondite and subtle meanings in his simple-sounding 

 explanations of things, we take the meaning to be that 

 which lies on the surface. More on this, however, anon. 

 Among the Red Races, one tribe thought that sun, moon, 

 and stars were men and women who went into the sea 

 every night and swam out by the east. The Bushmen say 

 that the sun was once a man who shed light from his body, 

 but only for a short distance, UTitil some children threw 

 him into the sky while he slept, and thus he shines upon 

 the wide earth. The Australians say that all was dark- 

 ness around them till one of their many ancestors, who 



still shine from the stars, shedding good and evil, threw, in 

 pity for them, an emu's egg into space, when it became 

 the sun. Among the Manacicas of Brazil, the sun was 

 their culture-hero, virgin-bom, and their jugglers, who 

 claimed power to lly through the air, said that his luminous 

 figure, as that of a man, could be seen by them, although 

 too dazzling for common mortals. 



The sun has been stayed in his course in other places than 

 Gibeon, although by mechanical means of which Joshua 

 appears to liave been independent Among the many 

 exploits of Maui, abounding in Polynesian myth, are those 

 of his capture of the sun. He had, like Prometheus, 

 snatched fire from heaven for mortals, and his next task 

 was to cure Ra, the sun-god, of his trick of setting before 

 the day's work was done. So ]\Iaui plaited thick ropes of 

 cocoa-nut fibre, and taking them to the opening through 

 which Ra climbed up from the nether world, he laid a slip- 

 noose for him, placing the other ropes at intervals along his 

 path. Lying in wait as Ra neared, he pulled the first rope, 

 but the noose only caught Ra's feet. Nor could Maui stop him 

 until he reached the sixth rope, when he was caught round 

 the neck and pulled so tightly by Maui that he had to come 

 to terms, and agree to slacken his pace for the future. 

 Maui, however, took the precaution to keep the ropes on 

 him, and they may still be seen hanging from the sun at 

 dawn and eve. In Tahitian myth, Jlaui is a priest, who, 

 in building a house which must be finished by daylight, 

 seizes the sun by its rays and binds it to a tree till the 

 house is built. In North American myth, a boy had 

 snared the sun, and there was no light on the earth. 

 So the beasts held council who should undertake the 

 perilous task of cutting the cord, when the dormouse, 

 then the biggest among them, volunteered. And it 

 succeeded, but so scorched was it by the heat that it was 

 shrivelled to the smallest of creatures. Such a group of 

 myths is not easy of explanation ; but when we find the 

 sun regarded as an ancestor, and as one bound, mill-horse- 

 like, to a certain course, the notion of [his control and 

 check would arise, and the sun-catchers take their place 

 in tradition among those who have deserved well of their 

 race. It is one among numberless aspects under which 

 the doings of the sun and of other objects in nature are 

 depicted as the doings of mortals, and the crude concep- 

 tions of the Ojibwas and the Samoans find their parallel in 

 the mythologies of our Aryan ancestors. Only in the 

 former we see the mighty one shorn of his dignity, with 

 noose round his neck or chains on either side ; whilst in 

 the latter we see him as Herakles, with majesty unim- 

 paired, carrying [out the twelve tasks imposed by Eurys- 

 theus, and thus winning for himself a place among the 

 immortals. 



THE WEATHER PROPHECIES. 



THE following very amusing and eflective letter ap- 

 peared in the Times of Wednesday, Jan. 17 : — 

 " One hears such opposite opinions confidently expressed 

 about the value of the official \\eather prophecies that I 

 wonder nobody has taken the trouble to test them by actual 

 history for a few weeks, and publish the result. It lately 

 occurred to me to do so, and here is the result for a lunar 

 month, which is amply sufficient for the purpose. I need 

 hardly say that if they are not oftener right than wrong 

 for each district they are useless ; and if they are oftener 

 wrong than right they are worse than useless, and we had 

 better toss vip daily for the weather on each point, of hot 

 or cold, wet or dry, foggy or clear, windy or still. In the 

 following list the quotation marks give the prophecies, and 



