or slay them. Then Tane-mahuta, father of forests, reasoned that it was better to rend them, so that the heaven might become a stranger, and the earth remain as their nursing-mother. One after another they strove to do this, but in vain, until Tane-mahuta, with giant strength and strain, pressed down the earth and thrust upward the heaven. But one of his brothers, father of wind and storm, who had not agreed to this parting of his parents, followed Rangi into the sky, and thence sent forth his progeny, “the mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the clouds dense and dark, wildly drifting, wildly hunting,” himself rushing on his foe, snapping the huge trees that barred his path, and strewing their trunks and branches on the ground, while the sea was lashed into high-crested waves, and all the creatures therein affrighted. The fish darted hither and thither, but the reptiles fled into the forests, causing quarrel between Tangaroa, the ocean-god, and Tane-mahuta for giving them shelter. So the brothers fought, the ocean-god wrecking the canoes and sweeping houses and trees beneath the waters, and had not Papa hidden the gods of the tilled food and the wild within her bosom, they would have perished. Wars of revenge followed quickly one upon the other; the storm-god’s anger was not soon appeased; so that the devastation of the earth was well-nigh complete. But, at last, light arose and quiet ensued, and the dry land appeared. Rangi and Papa, parted for ever, quarrelled no more, but helped the one the other, and “man stood erect and unbroken on his mother Earth.”

The myth of Cronus will at once occur to the reader. Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Gaea) were husband and wife, and their many children all hated their father for concealing them between the hollows of their mother’s breasts, so that they were shut out from light. Gaea sided with them and provided Cronus, the youngest, with an iron sickle wherewith he unmanned Uranus and separated him from Gaea. Cronus married his sister Rhea, and, at the advice of his parents, swallowed his children one by one as they were born, lest they grew up and usurped his place among the Immortals. But when Zeus was born, and Cronus asked for the child, Rhea deceived him by giving him a stone wrapped in swaddling bands. When Zeus grew up he gave his father an emetic, whereupon the children were all disgorged, and with them the stone, which became a sacred object at Delphi. There is no such being as Cronus in Sanskrit, but what may be called the Vedic variant of the myth is that in which Dyaus (Heaven) and Prithivî (Earth), were once joined and subsequently separated.

In China we find a legend of “a person called Puangku, who is said to have separated the heaven and the earth, they formerly being pressed down close together,” and, as one might expect, such a transparent nature-myth of the rending asunder of the world and sky is widespread.

The solar mythologists were perplexed at its presence among the refined and cultured Greeks. “How can we imagine that a few generations before the time of Solon the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks were adequately expressed by the story of Uranus maimed by Cronus, of Cronus eating his own children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive his own progeny. Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.” So the moral character of the Greeks and the exclusive comparative method of Professor Max Müller and his adherents were vindicated by the discovery that as Cronus means time, the apparently repulsive myth simply means that time swallows up the days which spring from it; “and,” remarks Sir G. W. Cox in his Manual of Mythology, “the old phrase meant simply this and nothing more, although before the people came to Greece they had forgotten its meaning.”[9] Cronus is a more than usually troublesome crux to the etymologists.

Here, as elsewhere, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life;” and we may turn to the fundamental idea resident in the myth. The savage, in the presence of recurring light and darkness, of the clouds lifting and dispersing before the sunrise, has his legend of a time when this was not so, but when heaven and earth were closed-in one upon the other till some hero thrust them apart. And, to his rude intelligence, the conception of night as a devouring monster, might easily “start the notion of other swallowing and disgorging beings.” In brief, to quote Mr. Andrew Lang, “just as the New Zealander had conceived of heaven and earth as at one time united, to the prejudice of their children, so the ancestors of the Greeks had believed in an ancient union of heaven and earth. Both by Greeks and Maoris, heaven and earth were thought of as living persons, with human parts and passions. Their union was prejudicial to their children, and so the children violently separated their parents.”[10]

The beliefs of the ancient Finns, as described in the Kalevala, in the world as a divided egg, of which the white is the ocean, the yolk the sun, the arched shell the sky, and the darker portions the clouds; and of the Polynesians that the universe is the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, at the tapering bottom of which is the root of all things, are to us so grotesque that it is not easy to regard them as explanations seriously invented by the human mind. Yet these, together with the notions of the two halves of the shell of Brahma’s egg, and of the two calabashes which form the heaven and the earth in African myth, find their correspondences in the widespread conception of the over-arching firmament as a hard and solid thing,[11] with holes (or windows[12]) to let the rain through, with gates through which angels descend,[13] or through which prophets peer into celestial mysteries;[14] a firmament outside which other people live, as instanced by the Polynesian term for strangers, “papalangi,” or “heaven-bursters.” In Esthonian myth Ilmarine hammers steel into a vault which he strained like a tent over the earth, nailing thereon the silver stars and moon, and suspending the sun from the roof of the tent with machinery to lift it up and let it down. The like achievement is recorded of Ilmarinen in the Kalevala, the cosmogony of which corresponds to that of the Esthonian Kalevipöeg.

These are the less refined forms of myths which have held their ground from pre-scientific times till now, and the rude analogies of which are justified by the appearances of things as presented by the senses. Man’s intellectual history is the history of his escape from the illusions of the senses, it is the slow and often tardily accepted discovery that nature is quite other than that which it