HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OP OBSERVATION. 301 



coming. Au innumerable crowd of people were there, and 

 the dawn cast light on all these nations at once. " At last the 

 face of the ground was dried by the sun : like a man the sun 

 showed himself, and his presence warmed and dried the sur- 

 face of the ground. Before the sun appeared, muddy and wet 

 was the surface of the ground, and it was before the sun ap- 

 peared, and then only the sun rose like a man. But his heat 

 had no strength, and he did but show himself when he rose, 

 he only remained like (an image in) a mirror, and it is not in- 

 deed the same sun that appears now, they say in the stories."^ 



Obscure as much of this is, there are things in it which 

 agree very curiously with the phenomena of the Ai'ctic regions. 

 The cold and darkness, the sea not like a sea but like rocks 

 rolled on the sand, the long waiting for the sun, and its ap- 

 pearance at last with little strength, and but just rising above 

 the horizon, form a picture which corresponds with the nature 

 of the high north, as much as it differs from that of the tropical 

 regions where the tradition is found. We read of Arctic voy- 

 agers going out to watch for the reappearance of the sun to- 

 wards the close of the long dismal winter,^ and the judgment 

 that it was not indeed the sun of Central America that appeared 

 so strangely, may be placed by the side of a remark made by 

 a savage in another country. Sir George Grey, travelling in 

 Australia, was once telling stories of distant countries to a 

 party of natives round the camp fire j " I now spoke to them 

 of still more northern latitudes ; and went so far as to describe 

 those countries in which the sun never sets at a certain period 

 of the year. Their astonishment now knew no bounds : ' Ah ! 

 that must be another sun, not the same as the one we see 

 here,' said an old man ; and in spite of all my arguments to 

 the contrary, the others adopted this opinion."^ 



The legend of the introduction of rice in Borneo relates how 

 a Dayak climbed up a tree which grew downward from the 

 sky, and so got up to the Pleiades, and there he found a per- 

 sonage who took him to his house and gave him boiled rice to 

 eat. He had never seen rice before, and the story says that 



> Brasseur, ' Popol Vuh,' pp. 231-43 ; 'Mexique,' vol. i. pp. 169-76. 

 2 Purchas, vol. iii. p. 499. ' Grey, Journals, vol. i. p 293. 



