Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/417

Rh statements as to the origin of man. First, there is the idea that ancestors sprang from the branches of a Tree. This is by far the most generally accepted theory of man's provenance among the Gilbertese of to-day.

The Original Tree, created by the Original God, was, I conjecture, a fundamental doctrine of the dark-skinned ancestors of the race. Had it belonged to the fair-skinned stock, then, if these were Tonga-fiti, their ejection from Samoa in the thirteenth century would have sent a Tree-dogma scattering over many groups of Polynesia, and we should have expected to find its traces over a wide area to-day. But we do not so find it in the Pacific. A Niene myth derives mankind from a tree; there is also a New Zealand story of how the god Tane took a tree to wife and procreated a number of gods and humans; and lastly, a creation-myth of Samoa shows how certain maggots, which later became the first men, grew from a vine planted on the first land. I can trace no other analogies in Polynesia, but Indonesia bristles with them. Dixon mentions myths in which trees were ancestors of the human race, from Ceram-laut and Gorrom Islands, Ambonia, Burn, Wetar, Minahassa, Tagalog (Philippines), several parts of Borneo, and other places in the area, and shows that the idea is found even as far north as Formosa and as far south as the Proserpine river in Queensland. A version, which he summarises, from the Kayan of central Borneo contains several singular ideas which are typically concatenated in Gilbertese origin myths. According to this version there existed in the beginning a spider (cp. Na Arean—Sir Spider); a stone fell into his web and became original land (cp. Na Atību—Sir Stone); a worm grew on the stone and made earth (cp. Riiki—the Eel); and a tree took root, in whose branches the ancestors of the human race were