Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/340

332 22. S. grew from O. There is a physical relation between them. Iron originates from sprouts of iron that grew up in the footprints of a bear (25c). The sprouts of iron refer to bog-iron ore, which has a spongy texture, with a tendency to assume arborescent forms. This notion that iron originated from sprouts seems to me to be the earliest germ of the other iron myths (25a, b). It was a very natural observation for anyone familiar with the ore, and when once this was assimilated in thought to the vegetable kingdom, it had to be watered and nourished like any other plant. This gave rise to the development of the story by an incident in which the daughters of Nature spilt milk upon a marsh. The original object of this was not, I think, to yield a material from which iron was to originate directly, but was rather to fertilize the sprouts of iron in the same way that shoots of corn are fertilized by rain.

In the following examples, most of them foreign, the earth is made from a handful of earth, or from a grain of sand, by a supernatural growth or expansion of the same. There is always a tacit assumption that ex nihilo nihil fit. In a short and defective Finnish prose story, the Devil, at God's command, descends to the bottom of the sea, and brings up some earth, which God rubs between His hands, and thus increases it. But the Devil had kept back in his mouth some earth, which grows in a similar ratio, and causes him intense pain. So God takes the earth from the Devil's mouth, and throws it down in Pohjola to become stones and rocks. According to a legend of the Altai Tatars, the world was made by God from a handful of earth brought up from the bottom of the sea by a man in the shape of a grey goose. On making a second descent, he brings up more earth in his mouth, which expands and nearly chokes him. He spits