s that a
classical precept was to set eggs under the hen at new moon, and that a
Lithuanian precept was to wean boys on a waxing and girls on a waning
moon--in order to make the boys strong and the girls delicate. On the
same grounds, he says, Orkney-men object to marry except with a growing
moon, and Mr. Dyer says that in Cornwall, when a child is born in the
interval between an old and a new moon, it is believed that he will
never live to manhood.

Dr. Turner relates several traditions of the moon current in Samoa.
There is one of a visit paid to the planet by two young men--Punifanga,
who went up by a tree, and Tafaliu, who went up on a column of smoke.
There is another of a woman, Sina, who was busy one evening cutting
mulberry-bark for cloth with her child beside her. It was a time of
famine, and the rising moon reminded her of a great bread-fruit--just as
in our country it has reminded some people of a green cheese. Looking
up, she said: 'Why cannot you come down and let my child have a bit of
you?' The moon was so indignant at being taken for an article of food,
that she came down forthwith and took up woman, child and wood. There
they are to this day, for in the full moon the Samoans still see the
features of Sina, the face of the child, and the board and mallet.

Mr. Andrew Lang finds in an Australian legend of the moon something
oddly like Grimm's tale of the Wolf and the Kids, which, again, he
likens to the old Greek myth of Cronos. The Australian legend is that
birds were the original gods, and that the eagle especially was a great
creative power. The moon was a mischievous being, who walked about the
earth doing all the evil he could. One day he swallowed the eagle. The
eagle's wives coming up, the moon asked where he could find a well. They
pointed out one, and while he was drinking, they struck him with a stone
tomahawk, which made him disgorge the eagle. This legend is otherwise
suggestive from the circumstances that among the Greeks the eagle was
the special bird of Zeus, and it was the eagle which carried off
Ganymede.

There is another Australian fable that the moon was a man, and the sun a
woman of doubtful reputation who appears at dawn in a coat of red
kangaroo-skin belonging to one of her lovers. In Mexico, also, the moon
is a man, across whose face an angry immortal once threw a rabbit; hence
the marks on the surface of the planet. These same marks are accounted
for in the Eskimo legend alread