_cannot_ play:
there is no light to produce a shadow. As usually chances, the
Scholars who try to resolve all the features of myth into physical
phenomena do not agree among themselves about the mouse. While the
mouse is the night according to M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann's
opinion the mouse is the lightning. He argues that the lightning was
originally regarded by the Aryan race as the 'flashing tooth of a
beast,' especially of a mouse. Afterwards men came to identify the
beast with his teeth, and, behold the lightning and the mouse are
convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that savages
regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the
result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent;[138]
thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in
Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus; while rain is the milk of a
heavenly cow--an idea recurring in the _Zend Avesta_. But it does not
follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all
the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a
serpent to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on
earth, not in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite
unproved, that any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a
mouse's teeth. The hypothesis is a _jeu d'esprit_, like the opposite
hypothesis about the mouse of Night. In these, and all the other
current theories of the Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship
of ordinary mice, and such small deer, has been either wholly
neglected, or explained by the first theory of symbolism that occurred
to the conjecture of a civilised observer. The facts of savage
animal-worship, and their relations to totemism, seem still unknown to
or unappreciated by Scholars, with the exception of Mr. Sayce, who
recognises totemism as the origin of the zoomorphic element in
Egyptian religion.

Our explanation, whether adequate or not, is not founded on an
isolated case. If Apollo superseded and absorbed the worship of the
mouse, he did no less for the wolf, the ram, the dolphin, and several
other animals whose images were associated with his own. The Greek
religion was more refined and anthropomorphic than that of Egypt. In
Egypt the animals were still adored, and the images of the gods had
bestial heads. In Greece only a few gods, and chiefly in very archaic
statues, had bestial heads; but besides the other deities the sculptor