he Giant Rabbit, he is always
referred to as a man, a giant or demigod perhaps, but distinctly as of
human nature, the mighty father or elder brother of the race.[1]

[Footnote 1: The writers from whom I have taken this myth are Nicolas
Perrot, _Memoire sur les Meurs, Coustumes et Relligion des Sauvages de
l'Amerique Septentrionale_, written by an intelligent layman who lived
among the natives from 1665 to 1699; and the various _Relations des
Jesuites_, especially for the years 1667 and 1670.]

Such is the national myth of creation of the Algonkin tribes, as it has
been handed down to us in fragments by those who first heard it. Has it
any meaning? Is it more than the puerile fable of savages?

Let us see whether some of those unconscious tricks of speech to which I
referred in the introductory chapter have not disfigured a true nature
myth. Perhaps those common processes of language, personification and
otosis, duly taken into account, will enable us to restore this narrative
to its original sense.

In the Algonkin tongue the word for Giant Rabbit is _Missabos_, compounded
from _mitchi_ or _missi_, great, large, and _wabos_, a rabbit. But there
is a whole class of related words, referring to widely different
perceptions, which sound very much like _wabos_. They are from a general
root _wab_, which goes to form such words of related signification as
_wabi_, he sees, _waban_, the east, the Orient, _wabish_, white, _bidaban_
(_bid-waban_), the dawn, _waban_, daylight, _wasseia_, the light, and many
others. Here is where we are to look for the real meaning of the name
_Missabos_. It originally meant the Great Light, the Mighty Seer, the
Orient, the Dawn--which you please, as all distinctly refer to the one
original idea, the Bringer of Light and Sight, of knowledge and life. In
time this meaning became obscured, and the idea of the rabbit, whose name
was drawn probably from the same root, as in the northern winters its fur
becomes white, was substituted, and so the myth of light degenerated into
an animal fable.

I believe that a similar analysis will explain the part which the muskrat
plays in the story. She it is who brings up the speck of mud from the
bottom of the primal ocean, and from this speck the world is formed by him
whom we now see was the Lord of the Light and the Day, and subsequently
she becomes the mother of his sons. The word for muskrat in Algonkin is
_wajashk_, the first letter of which often suffers