, attacked the huge reptile
and slew it by a cast of his dart. He stripped it of its skin, and
clothing himself in this trophy of conquest, drove all the other serpents
to the south.[1] As it is in the south that, in the country of the
Ojibways, the lightning is last seen in the autumn, and as the Algonkins,
both in their language and pictography, were accustomed to assimilate the
lightning in its zigzag course to the sinuous motion of the serpent,[2]
the meteorological character of this myth is very manifest.

[Footnote 1: H.R. Schoolcraft, _Algic Researches_, Vol. i, p. 179, Vol.
ii, p. 117. The word _animikig_ in Ojibway means "it thunders and
lightnings;" in their myths this tribe says that the West Wind is created
by Animiki, the Thunder. (Ibid. _Indian Tribes_, Vol. v, p. 420.)]

[Footnote 2: When Father Buteux was among the Algonkins, in 1637, they
explained to him the lightning as "a great serpent which the Manito vomits
up." (_Relation de la Nouvelle France_, An. 1637, p. 53.) According to
John Tanner, the symbol for the lightning in Ojibway pictography was a
rattlesnake. (_Narrative_, p. 351.)]

Thus we see that Michabo, the hero-god of the Algonkins, was both the god
of light and day, of the winds and rains, and the creator, instructor and
teacher of mankind. The derivation of his name shows unmistakably that the
earliest form under which he was a mythological existence was as the
light-god. Later he became more familiar as god of the winds and storms,
the hero of the celestial warfare of the air-currents.

This is precisely the same change which we are enabled to trace in the
early transformations of Aryan religion. There, also, the older god of the
sky and light, Dyaus, once common to all members of the Indo-European
family, gave way to the more active deities, Indra, Zeus and Odin,
divinities of the storm and the wind, but which, after all, are merely
other aspects of the ancient deity, and occupied his place to the
religious sense.[1] It is essential, for the comprehension of early
mythology, to understand this twofold character, and to appreciate how
naturally the one merges into and springs out of the other.

[Footnote 1: This transformation is well set forth in Mr. Charles Francis
Keary's _Outlines of Primitive Belief Among the Indo-European Races_
(London, 1882), chaps, iv, vii. He observes: "The wind is a far more
physical and less abstract conception than the sky or heaven; it is also a
more var