ined by the thought that his younger
brothers each took a higher place than his; so she pushed his land
up, and it is now next below the solid crust on which mortals live in
Mangaia. Vatea married a woman from one of the under worlds named Papa,
and their children had the regular human form. One child was born either
from Papa's head, like Athene from the head of Zeus, or from her armpit,
like Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus. Another child may be said, in the
language of dog-breeders, to have "thrown back," for he wears the form
of a white or black lizard. In the Mangaian system the sky is a solid
vault of blue stone. In the beginning of things the sky (like Ouranos in
Greece and Rangi in New Zealand) pressed hard on earth, and the god Ru
was obliged to thrust the two asunder, or rather he was engaged in this
task when Maui tossed both Ru and the sky so high up that they never
came down again. Ru is now the Atlas of Mangaia, "the sky-supporting
Ru".(1) His lower limbs fell to earth, and became pumice-stone. In these
Mangaian myths we discern resemblances to New Zealand fictions, as
is natural, and the tearing of the body of "the Very Beginning" has
numerous counterparts in European, American and Indian fable. But on the
whole, the Mangaian myths are more remarkable for their semi-scientific
philosophy than for their coincidences with the fancies of other early
peoples.

(1) Gill, p. 59.

The Samoans, like the Maoris and Greeks, hold that heaven at first fell
down and lay upon earth.(1) The arrowroot and another plant pushed up
heaven, and "the heaven-pushing place" is still known and pointed out.
Others say the god Ti-iti-i pushed up heaven, and his feet made holes
six feet deep in the rocks during this exertion. The other Samoan myths
chiefly explain the origin of fire, and the causes of the characteristic
forms and habits of animals and plants. The Samoans, too, possess
a semi-mythical, metaphysical cosmogony, starting from NOTHING, but
rapidly becoming the history of rocks, clouds, hills, dew and various
animals, who intermarried, and to whom the royal family of Samoa trace
their origin through twenty-three generations. So personal are Samoan
abstract conceptions, that "SPACE had a long-legged stool," on to which
a head fell, and grew into a companion for Space. Yet another myth says
that the god Tangaloa existed in space, and made heaven and earth, and
sent down his daughter, a snipe. Man he made out of the mus