y mentioned as the impressions of the
woman's sooty fingers on the face of her pursuer. By some mythologists
the moon is thought to be Medea, but it is more common to interpret
Medea as the daughter of the sun, _i.e._, the dawn.

It is certainly not a little curious to find the moon-lore, as the
star-lore, having so many points of resemblance among such
widely-separated and different peoples as the Greeks, the Egyptians, the
Australians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen of South Africa, the North
American Indians, and the New Zealand Maoris. The comparative
mythologists would argue from this resemblance a common origin of the
myth, and a distribution or communication from one race to the other.
The folk-lore mythologists would infer nothing of the sort. They say
there is nothing remarkable in all savage races imputing human motives
and sex to the heavenly bodies, for, in fact, to this day there are
savages, as in the South Pacific, who suppose even stones to be male and
female, and to propagate their species. On this method of interpretation
the hypothesis is not that the Australians, Indians, etc., received
their myths from, say, the Greeks, either by community of stock or by
contact and borrowing, but because the ancestors of the Greeks passed
through the same intellectual condition as the primitive races we now
know. And thus it is that in listening to the beautiful legends of the
Greeks, we are but, as Bacon says, hearing the harsh ideas of earlier
peoples 'blown softly through the flutes of the Grecians.'

Now, beside the personality of the moon, and the peculiar influence he
or she is supposed to exercise on mortals, there has survived an old
superstition that the moon has direct influence on the weather. Apropos
of this association, there is a pretty little Hindoo legend which is
current in Southern India, and which has been translated by Miss Frere,
daughter of Sir Bartle Frere. This is the story as told her by her
Lingaet ayah:

'One day the Sun, the Moon, and the Wind went out to dine with their
uncle and aunt, the Thunder and Lightning. Their mother (one of the most
distant stars you see far up in the sky) waited alone for her
children's return. Now, both the Sun and the Wind were greedy and
selfish. They enjoyed the great feast that had been prepared for them,
without a thought of saving any of it to take home to their mother; but
the gentle Moon did not forget her. Of every dainty dish that was
brought round she