“For this reason they adored him as their maker.  He it was, they thought, who produced the thunder and the lightning by hurling stones with his sling; and the thunder-bolts that fall, said they, are his children.  Few villages were willing to be without one or more of these.  They were in appearance small, round, smooth stones, but had the admirable properties of securing fertility to the fields, protecting from lightning,” etc.[1]

I shift the scene again; or, rather, group together the legends of three different localities.  I quote: 

“The Takahlis” (the Tacullies already referred to) “of the North Pacific coast, the Yurucares of the Bolivian Cordilleras, and the Mbocobi of Paraguay, each and all attribute the destruction of the world to a general conflagration, which swept over the earth, consuming everything living except a few who took refuge in a deep cave."[2]

The Botocudos of Brazil believed that the world was once destroyed by the moon falling upon it.

Let us shift the scene again northward: 

There was once, according to the Ojibway legends, a boy; the sun burned and spoiled his bird-skin coat; and he swore that he would have vengeance.  He persuaded his sister to make him a noose of her own hair.  He fixed it just where the sun would strike the land as it rose above the earth’s disk; and, sure enough, he caught the sun, and held it fast, so that it did not rise.

“The animals who ruled the earth were immediately put into great commotion.  They had no light. They called a council to debate upon the matter, and to appoint

[1.  Brinton’s “Myths of the New World,” p. 165.

2.  Ibid., p. 217.]

{p. 182}

some one to go and cut the cord, for this was a very hazardous enterprise, as the rays of the sun would burn up whoever came so near.  At last the dormouse undertook it, for at this time the dormouse was the largest animal in the world” (the mastodon?); “when it stood up it looked like a mountain.  When it got to the place where the sun was snared, its back began to smoke and burn with the intensity of the heat, and the top of its carcass was reduced to enormous heaps of ashes.  It succeeded, however, in cutting the cord with its teeth and freeing the sun, but it was reduced to very small size, and has remained so ever since.”

This seems to be a reminiscence of the destruction of the great mammalia.[1] The “enormous heaps of ashes” may represent the vast deposits of clay-dust.

Among the Wyandots a story was told, in the seventeenth century, of a boy whose father was killed and eaten by a bear, and his mother by the Great Hare.  He was small, but of prodigious strength.  He climbed a tree, like Jack of the Bean-Stalk, until he reached heaven.