whose offspring are the living creatures, men and beasts, and plants. Nowhere, in the telling of this oft-told tale, is presented nature veiled in more transparent personification, nowhere is the world's familiar daily life repeated with more childlike simplicity as a story of long past ages, than in the legend of 'The Children of Heaven and Earth,' written down by Sir George Grey among the Maoris. From Rangi, the heaven, and Papa, the earth, it is said, sprang all men and things, but sky and earth clave together, and darkness rested upon them and the beings they had begotten, till at last their children took counsel whether they should rend apart their parents or slay them. Then Tane-Mahuta, father of forests, said to his five great brethren: 'It is better to rend them apart, and let the heaven stand far above us, and the earth lie under our feet. Let the sky become as a stranger to us, but the earth remain close to us as our nursing mother.' So Rongo-matane, god and father of the cultivated food of man, arose and strove to separate the heaven and the earth; he struggled, but in vain, and vain, too, were the efforts of Tangaroa, father of fish and reptiles, and of Haumia-tikitiki, father of wild-growing food, and of Tu-matauenga, god and father of fierce men. Then slow uprises Tane-Mahuta, god and father of forests, and wrestles with his parents, striving to part them with his hands and arms. Lo, he pauses; his head is now firmly planted on his mother, the earth, his feet he raises up and rests against his father, the skies; he strains his back and limbs with mighty effort. Now are rent apart Rangi and Papa, and with cries and groans of woe they shriek aloud. But TaneMahuta pauses not; far, far beneath him he presses down the earth; far, far above him he thrusts up the sky. But Tawhirima-tea, father of the winds and storms, had never consented that his mother should be torn from her lord, and now there arose in his breast a fierce desire to war against his brethren. So the storm-god rose and foliowed his father to the realms above, hurrying to the sheltered hollows of the boundless skies to hide and cling and nestle there. Then came forth his progeny, the mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the clouds, dense, dark, fiery, wildly drifting, wildly bursting; and in their midst their father rushed upon his foe. Tane-Mahuta and his

giant forests stood unconscious and unsuspecting when the raging hurricane burst on thein, snapping the mighty trees across, leaving trunks and branches rent and torn upon the ground, for the insect and grub to prey on. Then the father of storms swooped down to lash the waters into billows, whose summits rose like cliffs, till Tangaroa, god of ocean and father of all that dwelt therein, fled affrighted through his seas. His children, Ika-tere, the father of fish, and Tu-tewehiwehi, the father of reptiles, sought where they might escape for safety; the father of the fish cried, 'Ho, ho, let us escape to the sea;' but the father of reptiles shouted in answer, 'Nay, nay, let us rather fly inland;' and so these creatures separated, for while the fish fled into the sea, the reptiles sought safety in the forests and scrubs. But the seagod Tangaroa, furious that his children, the reptiles, should have deserted him, has ever since waged war on his brother Tane, who gave them shelter in the woods. Tane attacks him in return, supplying the offspring of his brother Tu-matauenga, father of the fierce men, with canoes and spears and fish-hooks made from his trees, and with nets woven from his fibrous plants, that they may destroy withal the fish, the sea-god's children; and the sea-god turns in wrath upon the forest-god, overwhelms his canoes with the surges of the sea, sweeps with floods his trees and houses into the boundless ocean. Next the god of storms pushed on to attack his brothers the gods and the progenitors of the tilled food and the wild, but Papa, the earth, caught them up and hid them, and so safely were these her children concealed by their mother that the stormgod sought them in vain. So he fell upon the last of his brothers, the father of fierce men, but him he could not even shake, though he put forth all his strength. What cared Tu-matauenga for his brother's wrath? He it was who planned the destruction of their parents and had shown himself brave and fierce in war; his brethren had yielded before the tremendous onset of the storm-god and his progeny; the forest-god and his offspring had been broken and torn in pieces; the sea-god and his children had fled to the depths of the ocean or the recesses of the shore; the god of food had been safe in hiding; but man still stood erect and unshaken.

on the bosom of his mother earth, and at last the hearts of the heaven and the storm became tranquil and their passions became assuaged.

"But now Tu-matauenga, father of the fierce men, took thought how he might be avenged upon his brethren who had left him unaided to stand against the god of storms. He twisted nooses of the leaves of the whanake tree, and the birds and beasts, children of Tane, the forest-god, fell before him; he knitted nets from the flax-plant and dragged ashore the fish, the children of Tangaroa, the sea-god; he found in their hiding-place underground the children of Rongo-matane, the sweet-potato and all cultivated food, and the children of Haumia-tikitiki, the fern-root and all wild-growing food; he dug them up and let them wither in the sun, Yet, though he overcame his four brothers and they became his food, over the fifth he could not prevail, and Tawhiri-ma-tea, the storm-god, still ever attacks him in tempest and hurricane, striving to destroy him by both sea and land. It was the bursting forth of the storm-god's wrath against his brethren that caused the dry land to disappear beneath the waters. The beings of ancient days who thus submerged the land were Terrible-rain, Long-continued-rain, Fierce-hailstorms, and their progeny were Mist and Heavy-dew and Light-dew, and thus but little of the dry land was left above the sea. Then clear light increased in the world, and the beings who had been hidden between Rangi and Papa before they were parted now multiplied upon the earth. Up to this time the vast Heaven has still ever remained separated from his spouse, the earth; yet their mutual love still continues; the soft, warm sighs of her loving bosom still ever rise up to him, ascending from the woody mountains and valleys, and men call these mists; and the vast Heaven, as he mourns through the long nights his separation from his beloved, drops frequent tears upon her bosom, and men seeing these term them dew-drops.'

"In China the same idea of the universal parentage is accompanied by a similar legend of the separation of heaven and earth in the primeval days of Puang-Ku which seems to have taken the very shape of the Polynesian myth; 'some say a person called Puang-Ku opened or separated the

heavens and the earth, they previously being pressed down close together.' As to the mythic details in the whole story of 'the children of the heaven and earth' there is scarcely a thought that is not still transparent, scarcely even a word that has lost its meaning to us.

เ

"The idea of the earth as a mother is more simple and obvious, and no doubt for that reason more common to the world, than the idea of the heaven as a father. Among the native races of America the earth-mother is one of the great personages of mythology. The Peruvians worshiped her as Mama Ppacha, or 'Mother-earth;' the Caribs, when there was an earthquake, said it was their mother-earth dancing, and signifying to them to dance and make merry likewise, which accordingly they did. Among the North American Indians the Comanches call on the earth as their mother, and the Great Spirit as their father. A story told by Megg shows a somewhat different thought of mythic parentage. General Harrison once called upon the Shawnee chief Tecumseh for a talk: 'Come here, Tecumseh, and sit by your father!' he said. You my father!' replied the chief, with a stern air; 'No, yonder sun,' pointing towards it, 'is my father, and the earth is my mother; so I will rest upon her bosom,' and he sat down on the ground. Like this was the Aztec fancy, as it seems from this passage in a Mexican prayer to Tezcatlipoca, offered in time of war: 'Be pleased, O our Lord, that the nobles who shall die in the war be peacefully and joyously received by the sun and the earth, who are the living father and mother of all.' In the mythology of the Finns, Lapps, and Esths, earth-mother is a divinely honored personage. Through the mythology of our own country [England] the same thought may be traced, from the days when the Anglo-Saxon called upon the earth, Hail, thou Earth, men's mother' to the time when Medieval Englishmen made a riddle of her, asking 'Who is Adam's mother?' and poetry continued what mythology was letting fall, when Milton's archangel promised Adam a life to last

เ

'till like ripe fruit thou drop

Into thy mother's lap.'

Among the Aryan race, indeed, there stands, wide and firm, the double myth of the 'two great parents,' as the RigVeda calls them. They are Dyaushpitar (Zeus, Jupiter, the Heaven-father), and Prithivi Matar (the 'Earth-mother'), and their relation is still kept in mind in the ordinances of Brahman marriage, according to the Yajur Veda, where the bridegroom says to the bride, 'I am the sky, thou art the earth, come, let us marry.' When the Greek poets called Uranus and Gaia, or Zeus and Demeter, husband and wife, what they meant was the union of heaven and earth; and when Pluto said that the earth brought forth men, but God was their shaper, the same old mythic thought must have been present in his mind. It reappears in Scythia, and again in China, where heaven and earth are called, in the Shu-King, 'father and mother of all things.' Chinese philosophy naturally worked this idea into the scheme of the two great principles of nature, the Yn and Yang, male and female, heavenly and earthly, and from this disposition of nature they drew a practical moral lesson. 'Heaven,' said the philosophers of the Sung dynasty, 'made man, and earth made woman, and therefore women is to be subject to man as earth to heaven"" (pp.321-328).

ECLIPSES.

In connection with the world-wide myths of the sun, moon, and stars, the primitive notions of eclipses will be briefly considered. These natural phenomena are now so thoroughly understood that their recurrence is calculated with mathematical exactness, but in early times it was not so; they were then considered the very embodiment of miraculous disaster, caused by demons or monsters of evil. The Hindoos held various views upon the subject; one that eclipses were caused by the intervention of the monster Rahu, who devoured the sun and moon, with many absurd details; another that there were two demons, Rahu and Ketu, who devoured sun and moon respectively, and who were described in conformity with the phenomena of eclipses, Rahu being black, and Ketu red. When these voracious monsters were believed to be devouring the sun and moon, as obscuration took place, the