Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/112

102 which., placed at the four points of the compass, beat their-wings in alternation. The Assiniboins have a supreme deity, the manitou-bird, who lives in the upper skies; his eyes shoot out lightning, the beatings of his wings produce thunder, and his beak causes the falling rain. Belief in a thunder-bird is also found among the Brazilians, the Hervey-Islanders, the Caffres, and the Karens of Burmah. Thor, who strikes men with his hammer, is well known. In the Vedas, Par j ana is depicted as the god with resounding song who beats down the forests and makes the earth tremble; who frightens the innocent, while he strikes down the guilty; who diffuses life, and at whose approach vegetation springs up again. The Yorubas of western Africa fancy that thunder is produced by the god Zaconta throwing stones. The Slavs attribute the noise of thunder to the rolling of Elijah's chariot in the skies. The legend of the celestial father playing at ninepins with the porter of paradise is of common lore. The classical Æolus is matched by a similar conception among the Iroquois and the Polynesians, by whom the winds are supposed to be controlled by a divinity who holds them shut up in a cavern, whence he lets them out at his will. A legend current in New Zealand has it that each wind is assigned to its cavern, where the god Maui lets them out, or shuts them up by rolling a great stone in front of the mouth. But the west wind is excepted from this rule; the god can not reach it or find its cave, and it therefore blows during the largest part of the year. The red Indians all believed in the spirit of the wind as the supreme god, or the Great Spirit. In the Vedas, we find in turn Vâya, the breath, Vâta, the breather, and Roudra, the howler. The Esthonians direct their prayers to the mother of the winds, and exclaim on the approach of a tempest: "The mother of the winds is groaning; who knows how many other mothers are going to groan in their turn?" Sometimes the god of the wind becomes a mythological personage so distinct that we find it hard to discover his natural character; and it is still under discussion whether Hermes or Mercury personified the wind or the twilight.

Whirlwinds or water-spouts have been personified under the form of giants, of gigantic serpents, and of sea-dragons, as they said in the middle ages. "The sea was troubled before them," relates a character in the "Thousand and One Nights"; "from its bosom rose a black column toward the sky; I looked, and it was a Jinn of gigantic stature." This belief is common with all the Mussulman peoples. The columns of sand in the desert pass, in the eyes of the Arabs, for wicked genii. In China they believe that these formations are dragons; the Zulus make great serpents of them.

It is hard to conceive in temperate latitudes of the splendor of