CREATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD. 397 
sions, as a punishment for which a flood rises; and it is 
only by embarking—not in ordinary vessels—that cer- 
tain people save their lives, afterwards to become the 
progenitors of a powerful race. But there is one essen- 
tial difference. Whilst Noah and his family were saved 
Deo volente, the Fijian transgressors effected their escape 
notwithstanding Degei was resolved upon their destruc- 
tion. Williams adds, that in all, eight persons were 
saved, and that two tribes of people became extinct, 
one of them distinguished by a tail like that of a dog.* 
As the Fijians believe in the creation, so they be- 
lieve in the ultimate destruction, of the world. This 
appears incidentally from their tradition of the Daiga, 
a species of Amorphophallus, the foliage of which con- 
sists of a single leaf, supported on a stalk two to four 
feet long, and spreading out somewhat like an um- 
brella. In the cosmogony of the Samoans, the office of 
having, by means of its single foliage, pushed up the 
heavens when they emerged from chaos, is assigned to 
this plant, and the Fijians recommend it as a safe place 
of refuge when the end of the world approaches, the 
Daiga being a “vasu” to heaven (Vasu ki lagi: see 
p. 304). 
The immortality of the soul, and a ‘life hereafter, is 
are sacred. The spirits of the dead are said to throw a whale’s tooth at 
these trees, that their wives may be strangled. When a shock of an 
earthquake is felt, Degei is turning himself. This, and a few other little 
things, are not in the original. 
* The existence of savage tribes of people with a tail, somewhere in 
Africa, has as a popular belief been frequently alluded to in the newspapers. 
Dr. Kieser, the President of the Imperial Academy of Germany, has made 
numerous inquiries about them; and when Heuglin set out in search of 
Edward Vogel, his attention was particularly directed to this singular topic. 
