ductions," pumpkins,
maize, beans, and so forth.(3)

(1) Relations, 1633. In this myth one Messon, the Great Hare, is the
beginner of our race. He married a daughter of the Musk-rat.

(2) Here we first meet in this investigation a very widely distributed
myth. The myths already examined have taken the origin of earth for
granted. The Hurons account for its origin; a speck of earth was fished
out of the waters and grew. In M. H. de Charencey's tract Une Legende
Cosmogonique (Havre, 1884) this legend is traced. M. de Charencey
distinguishes (1) a continental version; (2) an insular version; (3) a
mixed and Hindoo version. Among continental variants he gives a Vogul
version (Revue de Philologie et d'Ethnographie, Paris, 1874, i. 10).
Numi Tarom (a god who cooks fish in heaven) hangs a male and female
above the abyss of waters in a silver cradle. He gives them, later, just
earth enough to build a house on. Their son, in the guise of a
squirrel, climbs to Numi Tarom, and receives from him a duck-skin and
a goose-skin. Clad in these, like Yehl in his raven-skin or Odin in
his hawk-skin, he enjoys the powers of the animals, dives and brings up
three handfuls of mud, which grow into our earth. Elempi makes men
out of clay and snow. The American version M. de Charencey gives from
Nicholas Perrot (Mem. sur les Moers, etc., Paris, 1864, i. 3). Perrot
was a traveller of the seventeenth century. The Great Hare takes a hand
in the making of earth out of fished-up soil. After giving other North
American variants, and comparing the animals that, after three attempts,
fish up earth to the dove and raven of Noah, M. de Charencey reaches the
Bulgarians. God made Satan, in the skin of a diver, fish up earth out
of Lake Tiberias. Three doves fish up earth, in the beginning, in the
Galician popular legend (Chodzko, Contes des Paysans Slaves, p. 374). In
the INSULAR version, as in New Zealand, the island is usually fished up
with a hook by a heroic angler (Japan, Tonga, Tahiti, New Zealand). The
Hindoo version, in which the boar plays the part of musk-rat, or duck,
or diver, will be given in "Indian Cosmogonic Myths".

(3) Brinton, American Hero-Myths, p. 54. Nicholas Perrot and various
Jesuit Relations are the original authorities. See "Divine Myths of
America". Mr. Leland, in his Algonkin Tales, prints the same story, with
the names altered to Glooskap and Malsumis, from oral tradition. Compare
Schoolcraft, v. 155, and i. 317, and the v