ries which we have quoted. In Melanesia, as in
Australia, the days were long, indeed endless, and people grew tired;
but instead of sending the sun down below by an incantation when night
would follow in course of nature, the Melanesian hero went to Night
(conceived of as a person) and begged his assistance. Night (Qong)
received Qat (the hero) kindly, darkened his eyes, gave him sleep,
and, in twelve hours or so, crept up from the horizon and sent the sun
crawling to the west.(7) In the same spirit Paracelsus is said to have
attributed night, not to the absence of the sun, but to the apparition
of certain stars which radiate darkness. It is extraordinary that a myth
like the Melanesian should occur in Brazil. There was endless day till
some one married a girl whose father "the great serpent," was the owner
of night. The father sent night bottled up in a gourd. The gourd was not
to be uncorked till the messengers reached the bride, but they, in their
curiosity, opened the gourd, and let night out prematurely.(8)

(1) Taylor, New Zealand, p. 131.

(2) Turner, Samoa, p. 20.

(3) Sahagun, French trans., vii. ii.

(4) Bleck, Hottentot Fables, p. 67; Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 9, 11.

(5) Compare a Californian solar myth: Bancroft, iii. pp. 85, 86.

(6) Bancroft, iii. 73, quoting Burgoa, i. 128, 196.

(7) Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.

(8) Contes Indiens du Bresil, pp. 1-9, by Couto de Magalhaes. Rio de
Janeiro, 1883. M. Henri Gaidoz kindly presented the author with this
work.

The myths which have been reported deal mainly with the sun as a person
who shines, and at fixed intervals disappears. His relations with the
moon are much more complicated, and are the subject of endless stories,
all explaining in a romantic fashion why the moon waxes and wanes,
whence come her spots, why she is eclipsed, all starting from the
premise that sun and moon are persons with human parts and passions.
Sometimes the moon is a man, sometimes a woman and the sex of the sun
varies according to the fancy of the narrators. Different tribes of the
same race, as among the Australians, have different views of the sex of
moon and sun. Among the aborigines of Victoria, the moon, like the sun
among the Bushmen, was a black fellow before he went up into the sky.
After an unusually savage career, he was killed with a stone hatchet
by the wives of the eagle, and now he shines in the heavens.(1) Another
myth explanatory of th