Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/34

xxiv themes that recur, once and again, and in forms that show surprisingly small variation. Universal, too, is the cataclysmic destruction of the earth by flood, or fire and flood, leaving a few survivors to repopulate the restored land. Usually this event marks the close of a First, or Antediluvian Age, in which the people were either animal in form or only abortively human. After the flood the animals are transformed once for all into the beings they now are, while the new race of men is created. It is not a little curious to find in many tribes tales of a confusion of tongues and dispersion of nations bringing to a close the cosmogonic period and leading into that of legendary history.

Such, in broad outline, is the chart of the Indian s cosmic perspective. It is with a view to its fuller illustration that the myths studied in the ensuing chapters have been chosen from the great body of American Indian lore.