the creation may be admitted; but, as will presently be seen, it is over-stating the case to say that he was conceived with the set purpose of furnishing the ordinary mind with a concrete solution or illustration of this great problem.  There is no evidence that P’an Ku had existed as a tradition before the time when we meet with the written account of him; and, what is more, there is no evidence that there existed any demand on the part of the popular mind for any such solution or illustration.  The ordinary mind would seem to have been either indifferent to or satisfied with the abstruse cosmogonical and cosmological theories of the early sages for at least a thousand years.  The cosmogonies of the I ching, of Lao Tzu, Confucius (such as it was), Kuan Tzu, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, were impersonal.  P’an Ku and his myth must be regarded rather as an accident than as a creation resulting from any sudden flow of psychological forces or wind of discontent ruffling the placid Chinese mind.  If the Chinese brought with them from Babylon or anywhere else the elements of a cosmogony, whether of a more or less abstruse scientific nature or a personal mythological narrative, it must have been subsequently forgotten or at least has not survived in China.  But for Ko Hung’s eccentricity and his wish to experiment with cinnabar from Cochin-China in order to find the elixir of life, P’an Ku would probably never have been invented, and the Chinese mind would have been content to go on ignoring the problem or would have quietly acquiesced in the abstract philosophical explanations of the learned which it did not understand.  Chinese cosmogony would then have consisted exclusively of the recondite impersonal metaphysics which the Chinese mind had entertained or been fed on for the nine hundred or more years preceding the invention of the P’an Ku myth.

Nue Kua Shih, the Repairer of the Heavens

It is true that there exist one or two other explanations of the origin of things which introduce a personal creator.  There is, for instance, the legend—­first mentioned by Lieh Tzu (to whom we shall revert later)—­which represents Nue Kua Shih (also called Nue Wa and Nue Hsi), said to have been the sister and successor of Fu Hsi, the mythical sovereign whose reign is ascribed to the years 2953-2838 B.C., as having been the creator of human beings when the earth first emerged from Chaos.  She (or he, for the sex seems uncertain), who had the “body of a serpent and head of an ox” (or a human head and horns of an ox, according to some writers), “moulded yellow earth and made man.”  Ssu-ma Cheng, of the eighth century A.D., author of the Historical Records and of another work on the three great legendary emperors, Fu Hsi, Shen Nung, and Huang Ti, gives the following account of her:  “Fu Hsi was succeeded by Nue Kua, who like him had the surname Feng.  Nue Kua had the body of a serpent and a human head, with