Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/639

Rh races perceive in the bones of the mammoth, so often found in their country, evidences of the real existence of underground monsters, whose movements may give rise to earthquakes. According to Livingstone, the natives of Magomoro relate that once when an earthquake occurred, by which rocks were thrown down from the mountains, the wise men of the country got together, and concluded that a star had fallen into the sea, and the consequent swelling of the waves had caused commotions over the whole earth.

Most of the astronomical conceptions of our Polynesian, African, and American brothers are childishly simple and crude enough, but at the same time curious. A very odd belief is that of the Namaqua Hottentots that the sun is a piece of bright bacon, which the people who go in ships draw up in the evening by enchantment, and let down again after they have cut a piece off from it. The Polynesians say that the god Maui holds the sun and regulates his course by means of a rope. In the beginning he hurt the star in catching it and deprived it of half its light, and since then the days have been longer and cooler, and men have been able to work in peace. The Japanese myths fable eight hundred thousand gods holding the sun with a rope, while it is all the time trying to get back into the cave out of which they have drawn it by means of a trick. The Society-Islanders have a story that the sun goes into the sea at night; it plunges in and is extinguished with a great hissing that can be heard away off in the west. And this recalls a story that is mentioned by Strabo. According to Bock, the Dyaks have a myth that the sun and the moon were made by the Almighty out of a peculiar clay which is found on the earth, but is very rare and costly, the vessels made from which, called guji blanga, are holy and protect against evil spirits. The settling of the sun's red disk upon the mountain-tops and its final descent behind the hills engaged the attention of dwellers in the regions where the phenomena assumed that character; and the Karens of Burmah and the mountain tribes of America spoke of the sun going down into a deep cleft in the rocks.

In passing over to the numerous myths in which the sun is regarded as a living being, we meet the belief of the Navajos that it is newly set in the sky every morning by a woman. Kext, we come to a great number of stories that personify the sun, although they may not make a god of it, and represent its setting as a process of being swallowed by some monster. Sometimes it is a hero, sometimes it is a virgin, which is thus swallowed and afterward released or rejected, as in the Greek stories of Perseus and Andromeda and Hercules and Hesione, the old Norse story of Eireck and the Dragon, and the Teutonic myths of Little Red Riding-hood and the Wolf and of the Seven Little Goats.

Without going into the discussion of sun-worship, of which so much has been written, we may refer to the wide diffusion of the