GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OP MYTHS. 327 



adore thee ; my mistress showed me thee, thy dog, and bush/^ 

 In the Samoan Islands in the Central Pacific, the dweller in 

 the moon is a woman. Her name was Sina, and she was beat- 

 ing out paper-cloth with a mallet. The moon was just rising, 

 and looked like a great bread-fruit, so Sina asked her to come 

 down and let her child have a bit of her. But the moon was 

 very angry at the idea of being eaten, and took up Sina, child, 

 and mallet and all, and there they are to be seen to this day.^ 



The heavenly bodies are gods and heroes, and tales of their 

 deeds in love and arms are found among the lower as among 

 the higher races. Apollo and Artemis, Helios and Selene, are 

 brother and sister, and so in the Polar Regions the Sun is a 

 maiden and the Moon her brother. The Esquimau^x tale tells 

 how, when the girl was at a festive gathering, some one de- 

 clared his love for her by shaking her by the shoulders, after 

 the manner of the country. She could not tell who it was in 

 the dark hut, so she smeared her hand with soot, and when he 

 came back, she blackened his face with her hand. When a 

 light was brought, she saw it was her brother, and fled, and he 

 rushed after her. She came to the end of the earth and sprang 

 out into the sky, and he followed her. There they became the 

 Sun and Moon, and this is why the moon is always chasing 

 the sun through the heavens ; and the moon is sometimes dark 

 as he turns his blackened cheek toward the earth." 



The natives of Van Diemen's Land, whose dismal history is 

 now closing in total extinction, are among the lowest tribes 

 known to Ethnology. Yet to them, as to higher races, the 

 idea is familiar that the stars are men, or beings of a higher 

 order who have appeared as men on eai'th. Their myth of the 

 two heroes who are now the twin stars Castor and Pollux, is 

 thus told by Milligan, as related by a native of the Oyster Bay 

 Tribe ; 



'"' My father, my grandfather, all of them lived a long time 

 ago, all over the country ; they had no fire. Two black-fellows 

 came, they slept at the foot of a hill, — a hill in my own coun- 

 try. On the summit of a hill they were seen by my fathers, 



1 Grimm, D. M., pp. 679-83. Turner, p. 247. See Mariner, vol. ii. p. 127. 

 " Hayes, ' Arctic Boat Journey,' p. 253. A different version in Cranz, p. 295. 



