birch, ash, etc.  In the Finn language, the word first used for thumb was afterwards applied to fingers generally, and the special word for the bay in which they lived came to be used for all bays.  See Castren, Vorlesungen ueber Finnische Mythologie.  This original confusion in the definition of scientific ideas, and the successive alternations by which they were re-cast, may be gathered from the analysis of language, and from facts which still occur among uncultured and ignorant people.  When the inhabitants of Mallculo saw dogs for the first time, they called them brooas, or pigs.  The inhabitants of Tauna also call the dogs imported thither buga, or pigs.  When the inhabitants of a small island in the Mediterranean saw oxen for the first time, they called them horned asses.

[18] See Gaussin’s Langue Polynesienne.

[19] This process of the evolution of primitive myth and of fetishes, will be more elaborately considered in Chapter VII., when we come to speak generally of the historic evolution of science and of myth.  The repetition is not superfluous, since it is necessary for the complete understanding of my theory.

[20] For example, in ancient Roman mythology the Fons was first adored, then Fontus, the father of all sources, and finally Janus, a solar myth, the father of Fontus.  Janus, as the sun, was the producer of all water, which rose by evaporation and fell again in rain.

[21] The Sanscrit word Vayuna, meaning light, was personified in Aurora, and afterwards signified the intelligence, or inward light; a symbolical evolution of myth towards a rational conception.  The worship of heaven and earth, united in a common type, is found among all Aryan peoples, and among other races.  The Germans worshipped Hertha, the original form of Erde, earth.  The Letts worshipped Mahte, or Mahmine, mother earth.  So did the Magyars, and the Ostiaks adored the earth under the Slavonic name of Imlia.  In China sacrifices to the divine earth Heou-tou and to the heaven Tien were fundamental rites.  In North America the Shawnees invoked earth as their great ancestress.  The Comanchi adored her as their common mother.  In New Zealand heaven and earth are worshipped as Rangi and Papi. (Grey:  Polynesian Mythology.) The myth of Apollo, light, sun, heat, combined also with serpent worship, is found modified in a thousand ways among all peoples, savages included.  See Schwartz, Urspung der Mythologie; J. Fergusson, Tree and Serpent Worship; Herbert Spencer, The Origin of Animal Worship; Maury, Religions de la Grece Antique.  They also appeared among the Hebrew and kindred races.  We find in the book of Job that God “by His spirit had garnished the heavens; His hand has formed the crooked serpent” (Job xxvi. 13), expressions which are almost Vedic.