are the islands. We
also hear that long ago he hovered as an enormous bird over the waters,
and there deposited an egg. The egg may be either the earth with the
overarching vault of heaven or (as in Egypt--but this is a later view)
the sun. The latter received mythical representation in that most
interesting god (but originally rather culture-hero) Maui, who, in New
Zealand practically supplants Tangaloa, and becomes the god of the air
and of the heaven, the creator and the causer of the flood.[14]
Speculation opened the usual deep problem; whence came the gods? It was
answered that Po, i.e. darkness, was the begetter of all things, even of
Tangaloa.

6. _Indian._--India, however, is the natural home of a mythology recast
by speculation. The classical specimen of an advanced cosmogony is to be
found in the Rig Veda (x. 129); it is the hymn which begins, "There then
was neither Aught nor Naught!"[15] Another such cosmogony is given in
Manu. It is "the self-existent Lord," who, "with a thought, created the
waters, and deposited in them a seed which became a golden egg, in which
egg he himself is born as Brahm[=a], the progenitor of the worlds."[16]
The doctrine of creation by a thought is characteristically Indian. In
the satapatha Brahmana (cf. Deluge), we meet again with the primeval
waters and the world-egg, and with the famous mythological
tortoise-theory,[17] also found among the Algonkins (S 2)--antique
beliefs gathered up by the framers of philosophic systems, who felt the
importance of maintaining such links with the distant past.

7. _Egyptian._--In Egypt too the systematizers were busily engaged in
the co-ordination of myths. They retained the belief that the germs of
all things slept for ages within the dark flood, personified as Nun or
Nu. How they were drawn forth was variously told.[18] In some districts
the demiurge was called Khn[=u]mu; it was he who modelled the egg (of
the world?) and also man.[19] Elsewhere he was the artizan-god Ptah,
who with his hammer broke the egg; sometimes Thoth, the moon-god and
principle of intelligence, who spoke the world into existence.[20] A
strange episode in the legend of the destruction of man by the gods
tells how Ra (or Re), the first king of the world, finding in his old
age that mankind ceased to respect him, first tried the remedy of
massacre, and then ascended the heavenly cow, and organized a new
world--that of heaven.[21]

8. _Iranian._--The Iranian account of