s inadequate, or inadequately equipped--because it did not harmonise
with its environment.(1) For these series of experimental creations and
inefficient evolutions vast spaces of time were required, according to
the Aztec and Indo-Aryan philosophies. It is not impossible that actual
floods and great convulsions of nature may have been remembered
in tradition, and may have lent colour and form to these somewhat
philosophic myths of origins. From such sources probably comes the
Mexican hypothesis of a water-age (ending in a deluge), an earth-age
(ending in an earthquake), a wind-age (ending in hurricanes), and the
present dispensation, to be destroyed by fire.

(1) As an example of a dim evolutionary idea, note the myths of the
various ages as reported by Mendieta, according to which there were five
earlier ages "or suns" of bad quality, so that the contemporary human
beings were unable to live on the fruits of the earth.

The less philosophic and more popular Aztec legend of the commencement
of the world is mainly remarkable for the importance given in it to
objects of stone. For some reason, stones play a much greater part in
American than in other mythologies. An emerald was worshipped in the
temple of Pachacamac, who was, according to Garcilasso, the supreme and
spiritual deity of the Incas. The creation legend of the Cakchiquels of
Guatemala(1) makes much of a mysterious, primeval and animated obsidian
stone. In the Iroquois myths(2) stones are the leading characters. Nor
did Aztec myth escape this influence.

(1) Brinton, Annals of the Cakchiquels.

(2) Erminie Smith, Bureau of Ethnol. Report, ii.

There was a god in heaven named Citlalatonac, and a goddess, Citlalicue.
When we speak of "heaven" we must probably think of some such world of
ordinary terrestrial nature above the sky as that from which Ataentsic
fell in the Huron story. The goddess gave birth to a flint-knife, and
flung the flint down to earth. This abnormal birth partly answers to
that of the youngest of the Adityas, the rejected abortion in the Veda,
and to the similar birth and rejection of Maui in New Zealand. From
the fallen flint-knife sprang our old friends the magnified non-natural
beings with human characteristics, "the gods," to the number of 1600.
The gods sent up the hawk (who in India and Australia generally comes
to the front on these occasions), and asked their mother, or rather
grandmother, to help them to make men, to be th