138 CLUB TYPES OF NUCLEAR POLYNESIA. 
island-group in Nuclear Polynesia, from Polynesia of the later migra- 
tions, and from several sources in Melanesia we derive the tale of the 
time when the sky lay flat upon the earth and men were forced to creep 
until this hero or that bridged his trunk upon the ground, arched his 
shoulders, and with a mighty effort shoved the sky up into the place 
which it now occupies and made room for men to walk erect. ‘Turner 
(Samoa, 198) cites briefly the variants of this legend: 
‘The Samoans say that of old the heavens fell down and that people had 
to crawl about like the lower animals. After a time the arrowroot and another 
similar plant pushed up the heavens, and the place where these plants grew 
is still pointed out and called the Teengalangi, or heaven-pushing place; but 
the heads of the people continued to knock on the skies, and the place was 
exceedingly hot. One day a woman was passing along who had been drawing 
water. A man came up to her and said he would push up the heavens if she 
would give him some water to drink. ‘Push them up first,’ she replied. He 
pushed them up and said, ‘Will that do?’ ‘No,’ said she, ‘a little farther.’ 
He sent them up higher still and then she handed him her coconut shell water 
bottle. Another account says that the giant god ‘Ti‘iti‘1 pushed up the 
heavens, and that at the place where he stood there are hollow places in a 
rock nearly six feet long which are pointed out as his footprints.” 
In Nanomea, Nukufetau, and Nui it is the sea-serpent who raises the 
sky by standing erect upon his tail. 
I have been thus particular in establishing the fact that the sky does 
appear to these islanders a dome for the reason that we must be sedu- 
lous to avoid the error of assuming that the truisms oi our own sense per- 
ception are essentially included in the psychology of the savage. It 
is not in nature but in our interpretation of nature that the heavens 
arch above us; there are races who are unable to see it in that form. 
_ But it is clear that the arch of heaven is appreciated by the people of 
this our present study. It does not necessarily depend therefrom that 
their pictorial sense has yet reached the point of interpretation whereby 
an arc can be taken to represent a dome, for they have no under- 
standing of the fact that the figure formed at the intersection of certain 
planes with a hemisphere is a semicircle; such optical mathematics is 
far beyond their cognition. I should much prefer to regard these two 
arcs as pictures of the rainbow. We find, however, none of the acces- 
sory sky symbols which we have been led to propose in the interpreta- 
tion of figures 83 and 84. Within the arc in figure 52 we find a detail 
of diagonals with four intervening heavy lines, something in the form 
of such a ladder as we, but not the Polynesians, know; this figure is 
unique and evades interpretation. But exterior to the arc in this 
figure, interior to the arc in figure 51, we find a design of parallel lines 
which toward the right of the latter tend to become radiant; with this 
we must associate the crescentic ornament of slim lozenges interior to 
all the arcs in figures 52 and 53, for the lozenge might readily arise as an 
amplification of the straight line. One character is common to this 
