Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/420

 1 1 2 Myths from the Gilbert Isla^ids.

from the island of Maiana which, assuming them to have been originally maggots, shows how they were afterwards endowed with legs, arms, and human attributes by Na Arean. The maggot idea is, I believe, another phase of the concept of formlessness so often found in Indonesia ; that it has penetrated to Nuclear Polynesia is shown in the Samoan myth, quoted above, wherein maggots are said to have been the first ancestors of the human race, born on the original tree.