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much an intellectual appetite as it is with us. How does he try 

 to satisfy this craving ? Mr. Tylor, another authority on these 

 vastly interesting enquiries replies: — "When the attention of a 

 man in the myth-making stage of intellect " — (a delightful phrase 

 that) —" is drawn to any phenomenon or custom, which has to 

 him no obvious reason, he invents a story to account for it," 



We now know how it is that savages come to have a mythology. 

 It is their way of satisfying the early form of scientific curiosity, 

 and their way of realizing the world in which they move. But 

 they frame their stories, necessarily and naturally, in harmony 

 with the general theory of things, with what we may call " savage 

 metaphysics. But to the savage and apparently to peoples more 

 backward than the most backward peoples of which we know, all 

 nature was a series of animated personalities. 



Thus the Bushmen say the wind was formerly a person, and 

 it is a tradition among them that he was once seen. The 

 Egyptians, according to Herodotus, believed fire to be a live 

 beast. 



The Piute Indians have this legend : The sun is the father 

 and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his 

 wife, and the stars are their children. The sun eats his children 

 whenever he can catch them. They flee before him, and are all 

 the time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When 

 he (their father) appears in the morning you see all the stars, his 

 children, fly out of sight, go away back into the blue of the above, 

 and they do not wake to be seen again until he (their father) is 

 about going to his bed. 



Down deep under the earth — deep, deep under the ground — is a 

 great hole. At night, when he has passed over the world, 

 looked down on everything, and finished his work he, the sun, 

 goes into his hole, and he crawls and creeps along till he comes 

 to his bed in the middle part of the earth. So then he, the sun, 

 sleeps there in his bed all night. 



This hole is so little, and he, the sun, is so big, that he cannot 

 turn round in it, and so he must, when he has bad his sleep, pass 

 on through, and in the morning we see him come out in the east. 

 When he, the sun, has come out he begins to hunt up through 

 the sky to catch and eat any that he can of the stars, his children ; 

 for if he does not so catch and eat he cannot live. He, the sun, 

 is not all seen. The shape of him is like a snake or a lizard. It 

 is not his head that we see, but his belly, filled up with the stars 

 that times and times he has swallowed. 



The moon is the mother of the heavens, and is the wife of the 

 sun. She, the moon, goes into the same hole as her husband to 

 sleep her naps. But always she has great fear of the sun her 

 husband, and when he comes through the hole to the nobee (tent) 



