26 MYTHOLOGY OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
and carried them aloft, and they were transformed into bright stars. 
But still it was cold and the people murmured again, and Matcito said, 
‘Bring me seven buffalo robes,” and they brought him seven buffalo 
robes, and from the densely matted hair of the robes he wove another 
wonderful fabric, which the storm carried away into the sky, and it 
was transformed into the full-orbed sun. Then Matcito appointed 
times and seasons and ways for the heavenly bodies, and the gods of 
the firmament have obeyed the injunctions of Matcito from the day of 
their creation to the present. 
The Norse philosopher tells us that Night and Day, each, has a horse 
and a car, and they drive successively one after the other around the 
world in twenty-four hours. Night rides first with her steed named 
Dew-hair, and every morning as he ends his course he bedews the earth 
with foam from his bit. The steed driven by Day is Shining-hair. All 
the sky and earth glisten with the light of his mane. Jarnved, the 
great iron-wood forest lying to the east of Midgard, is the abode of a 
race of witches. One monster witch is the mother of many sons in the 
form of wolves, two of which are Skol and Hate. Skol is the wolf that 
would devour the maiden Sun, and she daily flies from the maw of the 
terrible beast, and the moon-man flies from the wolf Hate. 
The philosopher of Samos tells us that the earth is surrounded by 
hollow crystalline spheres set one within another, and all revolving at 
different rates from east to west about the earth, and that the sun is set 
in one of these spheres and the moon in another. 
The philosopher of civilization tells us that the sun is an incandescent 
globe, one of the millions afloat in space. About this globe the planets 
revolve, and the sun and planets and moons were formed from nebulous 
matter by the gradual segregation of their particles controlled by the 
laws of gravity, motion, and affinity. 
The sun, traveling by an appointed way across the heavens with the 
never-ending succession of day and night, and the ever-recurring train 
of seasons, is one of the subjects of every philosophy. Among all 
peoples, in all times, there is an explanation of these phenomena, but 
in the lowest stage, way down in savagery, how few the facts discerned, 
how vague the discriminations made, how superficial the resemblances 
by Which the phenomena are classified! In this stage of culture, all the 
daily and monthly and yearly phenomena which come as the direct re- 
sult of the movements of the heavenly bodies are interpreted as the 
doings of some one—some god acts. In civilization the philosopher 
presents us the science of astronomy with all its accumulated facts of 
magnitude, and weights, and orbits, and distances, and velocities—with 
all the nice discriminations of absolute, relative, and apparent motions; 
and all these facts he is endeavoring to classify in homologic categories, 
and the evolutions and revolutions of the heavenly bodies are explained 
as an orderly succession of events. 
Rain.—The Shoshoni philosopher believes the domed firmament to be 
