of as living persons,
with human parts and passions. Their union was prejudicial to their
children, and so the children violently separated the parents. This
conduct is regarded as impious, and as an awful example to be avoided,
in Maori pahs. In Naxos, on the other hand, Euthyphro deemed that the
conduct of Cronus deserved imitation. If ever the Maoris had reached a
high civilisation, they would probably have been revolted, like
Socrates, by the myth which survived from their period of savagery.
Mr. Tylor well says,[36] 'Just as the adzes of polished jade, and the
cloaks of tied flax-fibre, which these New Zealanders were using but
yesterday, are older in their place in history than the bronze
battle-axes and linen mummy-cloths of ancient Egypt, so the Maori
poet's shaping of nature into nature-myth belongs to a stage of
intellectual history which was passing away in Greece five-and-twenty
centuries ago. The myth-maker's fancy of Heaven and Earth as father
and mother of all things naturally suggested the legend that they in
old days abode together, but have since been torn asunder.'

* * * * *

That this view of Heaven and Earth is natural to early minds, Mr.
Tylor proves by the presence of the myth of the union and violent
divorce of the pair in China.[37] Puang-ku is the Chinese Cronus, or
Tutenganahau. In India,[38] Dyaus and Prithivi, Heaven and Earth, were
once united, and were severed by Indra, their own child.

This, then, is our interpretation of the exploit of Cronus. It is an
old surviving nature-myth of the severance of Heaven and Earth, a myth
found in China, India, New Zealand, as well as in Greece. Of course it
is not pretended that Chinese and Maoris borrowed from Indians and
Greeks, or came originally of the same stock. Similar phenomena,
presenting themselves to be explained by human minds in a similar
stage of fancy and of ignorance, will account for the parallel myths.

The second part of the myth of Cronus was, like the first, a
stumbling-block to the orthodox in Greece. Of the second part we offer
no explanation beyond the fact that the incidents in the myth are
almost universally found among savages, and that, therefore, in Greece
they are probably survivals from savagery. The sequel of the myth
appears to account for nothing, as the first part accounts for the
severance of Heaven and Earth. In the sequel a world-wide _Maerchen_,
or tale, seems to have been attac