f the introduction of
civilisation. North of the Thlinkeets, a bird and a dog take the
creative duties, the Aleuts and Koniagas being descended from a dog.
Among the more northern Tinnehs, the dog who was the progenitor of the
race had the power of assuming the shape of a handsome young man. He
supplied the protoplasm of the Tinnehs, as Purusha did that of the Aryan
world, out of his own body. A giant tore him to pieces, as the gods tore
Purusha, and out of the fragments thrown into the rivers came fish, the
fragments tossed into the air took life as birds, and so forth.(1) This
recalls the Australian myth of the origin of fish and the Ananzi stories
of the origin of whips.(2)

(1) Hearne, pp. 342, 343; Bancroft, iii. 106.

(2) See "Divine Myths of Lower Races". M. Cosquin, in Contes de
Lorraine, vol. i. p. 58, gives the Ananzi story.

Between the cosmogonic myths of the barbarous or savage American tribes
and those of the great cultivated American peoples, Aztecs, Peruvians
and Quiches, place should be found for the legends of certain races
in the South Pacific. Of these, the most important are the Maoris or
natives of New Zealand, the Mangaians and the Samoans. Beyond the usual
and world-wide correspondences of myth, the divine tales of the various
South Sea isles display resemblances so many and essential that they
must be supposed to spring from a common and probably not very distant
centre. As it is practically impossible to separate Maori myths of the
making of things from Maori myths of the gods and their origin, we must
pass over here the metaphysical hymns and stories of the original
divine beings, Rangi and Papa, Heaven and Earth, and of their cruel but
necessary divorce by their children, who then became the usual Titanic
race which constructs and "airs" the world for the reception of man.(1)
Among these beings, more fully described in our chapter on the gods
of the lower races, is Tiki, with his wife Marikoriko, twilight. Tane
(male) is another of the primordial race, children of earth and heaven,
and between him and Tiki lies the credit of having made or begotten
humanity. Tane adorned the body of his father, heaven (Rangi), by
sticking stars all over it, as disks of pearl-shells are stuck all
over images. He was the parent of trees and birds, but some trees are
original and divine beings. The first woman was not born, but formed out
of the sun and the echo, a pretty myth. Man was made by Tiki, who to