Here, as often happens, the impressive facts are remembered, but in a disarranged chronological order.  There came a whirlwind, thick with dust, the clay-dust, and drifting sand and gravel.  It left the world naked and lifeless, “silent and bleak”; only one Indian remained, and he was dreadfully hungry.  But after a time all this catastrophe passed away, and the earth was once more populous and beautiful.

In the Peruvian legends, Apocatequil was the great god who saved them from the powers of the darkness.  He restored the light.  He produced the lightning by hurling stones with his sling.  The thunder-bolts are small, round, smooth stones.[2]

The stone-worship, which played so large a part in antiquity, was doubtless due to the belief that many of the stones of the earth had fallen from heaven.  Dr. Schwarz,

[1.  Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iii, p. 86.

2.  Brinton’s “Myths of the New World,” p. 165.]

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of Berlin, has shown that the lightning was associated in popular legends with the serpent.

“When the lightning kindles the woods it is associated with the descent of fire from heaven, and, as in popular imagination, where it falls it scatters the thunderbolts in all directions, the flint-stones, which flash when struck, were supposed to be these fragments, and gave rise to the stone-worship so frequent in the old world."[1]

In Europe, in old times, the bowlders were called devil-stones; they were supposed. to have originated from “the malevolent agency of man’s spiritual foes.”  This was a reminiscence of their real source.

The reader will see (page 173, ante) that the Iroquois legends represent the great battle between the White One, the sun, and the Dark One, the comet.  The Dark One was wounded to death, and, as it fled for life, “the blood gushed from him at every step, and as it fell turned into flint-stones.”

Here we have the red clay and the gravel both represented.

Among the Central Americans the flints were associated with Hurakan, Haokah, and Tlaloe {_Tlaloc?—­jbh_}, the gods of storm and thunder: 

“The thunder-bolts, as elsewhere, were believed to be flints, and thus, as the emblem of the fire and the storm, this stone figures conspicuously in their myths.  Tohil, the god who gave the Quiches fire by shaking his sandals, was represented by a flint-stone.  Such a stone, in the beginning of things, fell from heaven to earth, and broke into sixteen hundred pieces, each of which sprang up a god. . . .  This is the germ of the adoration of stones as emblems of the fecundating rains.  This is why, for example) the Navajos use, as their charm for rain, certain

[1.  Brinton’s “Myths of the New World,” p. 117.]

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long, round stones, which they think fall from the cloud when it thunders."[1]