eclipses, but who kept up a relic of the old belief by con- tinuing to speak in mythologic phrase of the Sun and Moon being eaten.[1] Elsewhere in the lower culture, there prevailed similar mythic conceptions. In the South Sea Islands some supposed the Sun and Moon to be swallowed by an offended deity, whom they therefore induced, by liberal offerings, to eject the luminaries from his stomach.[2] In Sumatra we have the comparatively scientific notion that an eclipse has to do with the action of the Sun and Moon on one another, and, accordingly, they make a loud noise with sounding instruments to prevent the one from devouring the other.[3] So, in Africa, there may be found both the rudest theory of the Eclipse-monster, and the more ad- vanced conception that a solar eclipse is 'the Moon catching the Sun.'[4]
It is no cause for wonder that an aspect of the heavens so awful as an eclipse should in times of astronomic ignorance have filled men's minds with terror of a coming destruction of the world. It may help us still to realize this thought if we consider how, as Calmet pointed out many years ago, the prophet Joel adopted the plainest words of description of the solar and lunar eclipse, 'The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood;' nor could the thought of any catastrophe of nature have brought his hearers face to face with a more lurid and awful picture. But to our minds, now that the eclipse has long passed from the realm of mythology into the realm of science, such words can carry but a feeble glimmer of their early meaning. The
1 J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 53, 219, 231, 255, 395, 420; Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. pp. 329, 467, 585, vol. ii. p. 109 ; Southey, 'Brazil,' vol. i. p. 352, vol. ii. p. 371; De la Borde, 'Caraibes,' p. 525; Dobrizhoffer, 'Abipones,' vol. ii. p. 84; Smith and Lowe, 'Journey from Lima to Para,' p. 230; Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes of N. A.' part i. p. 271; Charlevoix, 'Nouv. France,' vol. vi. p. 149; Cranz, 'Grönland,' p. 295; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 191; 'Early Hist, of Mankind,' p. 163.
2 Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 331. 3 Marsden, 'Sumatra,' p. 194. 4 Grant in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 90; Kölle, 'Kanuri Proverbs, &c.,' p. 207.
