return.' Then the younger kills the son of the elder, and that is the beginning of death.[1]
We find remarkable analogues in South Africa to the myth of the snake and the louse. On the Gold Coast, among the Zulus, and elsewhere, it is related that the first great Being sent an animal (a chameleon) to mankind with the message that they were to live and never die. But then the Being changed his mind, and sent after it another animal (the fleet-footed salamander) with the message that they were to die; and as the latter arrived first, so it was. There are several forms of this myth. Among the Hottentots it was the moon who sent the message to mankind: 'You, like me, shall die and come to life again.' But the hare heard this, and ran ahead and said: 'You, like me, shall die and never come to life again.'[2] This myth, again, is remarkably similar to the Fiji legend quoted above; and thus we have a bridge between the second and third Greenland myth, which must accordingly be taken to be two variants of one original—an exceedingly ancient one, since it has spread so far.
- ↑ Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 355; A. Lang, La Mythologie (Paris, 1886), pp. 204, 206; Smithsonian Institute, Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1879-80, p. 45. The choice between day and night in the Greenland form of the myth may possibly be borrowed, directly or indirectly, from the biblical cosmogony.
- ↑ Christaller in Zeitschrift für afrikanischen Sprachen, I. 1887-88, pp. 49-62. Compare also Bleek, Reineke Fuchs in Afrika (Weimar, 1870): Tylor, op. cit., p. 355; A. Lang, op. cit., p. 203.
