Custom and Myth

{97b}  Sonne, Mond und Sterne, pp. 213, 229.

{99a}  This proves that the tale belongs to the pre-Christian cannibal
age.

{99b}  Turner's Samoa, p. 102.  In this tale only the names of the
daughters are translated; they mean 'white fish' and 'dark fish.'

{99c}  Folk-Lore Journal, August 1883.

{101}  Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, ii. 94-104.

{102a}  Nature, March 14, 1884.

{102b}  The earlier part of the Jason cycle is analysed in the author's
preface to Grimm's Marchen (Bell & Sons).

{104a}  Comm. Real. i. 75.

{104b}  See Early History of the Family, infra.

{105a}  The names Totem and Totemism have been in use at least since
1792, among writers on the North American tribes.  Prof. Max Muller
(Academy, Jan. 1884) says the word should be, not Totem, but Ote or Otem.
Long, an interpreter among the Indians, introduced the word Totamism in
1792.

{105b}  Christoval de Moluna (1570), p. 5.

{105c}  Cieza de Leon, p. 183.

{105d}  Idyll xv.

{107}  Sayce, Herodotos, p. 344; Herodotus, ii. 42; Wilkinson's Ancient
Egyptians (1878, ii. 475, note 2); Plutarch, De Is. et Os., 71, 72;
Athenaeus, vii. 299; Strabo, xvii. 813.

{108a}  The Mouse, according to Dalton, is still a totem among the Oraons
of Bengal.  A man of the Mouse 'motherhood,' as the totem kindred is
locally styled, may not eat mice (esteemed a delicacy), nor marry a girl
who is a Mouse.

{108b}  xiii. 604.  Casaub. 1620.

{108c}  There were Sminthiac feasts at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete
(De Witte, Revue Numismatique, N.S. iii. 3-11).

{109a}  Iliad, i. 39.

{109b}  AElian, H. A. xii. 5.

{110a}  The bas-relief is published in Paoli's Della Religione de'
Gentili, Naples, 1771, p. 9; also by Fabretti, Ad Cal. Oper. de Colum.
Trajan. p. 315.  Paoli's book was written after the discovery in
Neapolitan territory of a small bronze image, hieratic in character,
representing a man with a mouse on his hand.  Paoli's engraving of this
work of art, unluckily, does not enable us to determine its date or
_provenance_.  The book is a mine of mouse-lore.

{110b}  Colden, History of the Five Nations, p. 15 (1727).

{110c}  Onomast., ix. 6, segm. 84, p. 1066.

{110d}  De Witte says Pollux was mistaken here.  In the Revue
Numismatique, N.S. iii., De Witte publishes coins of Alexandria, the more
ancient Hamaxitus, in the Troad.  The Sminthian Apollo is represented
with his bow, and the mouse on his hand.  Other coins show the god with
the mouse at his foot, or show us the lyre of Apollo supported by mice.  A
bronze coin in the British Museum gives Apollo with the mouse beside his
foot.

{111a}  Spanheim, ad Fl. Joseph., vi. I, p. 312.

{111b}  Della Rel., p. 174.

{111c}  Herodotus, ii. 141.

{112a}  Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, p. 13, quoting Journal Asiatique, 1st
series, 3, 307) finds the same myth in Chinese annals.  It is not a god,
however, but the king of the rats, who appears to the distressed monarch
in his dream.  Rats then gnaw the bowstrings of his enemies.  The
invaders were Turks, the rescued prince a king of Khotan.  The king
raised a temple, and offered sacrifice--to the rats?

{112b}  Herodotos, p. 204.

{113a}  Wilkinson, iii. 294, quoting the Ritual xxxiii.: 'Thou devourest
the abominable rat of Ra, or the sun.'

{113b}  Mr. Loftie has kindly shown me a green mouse containing the
throne-name of Thothmes III.  The animals thus used as substitutes for
scarabs were also sacred, as the fish, rhinoceros, fly, all represented
in Mr. Loftie's collection.  See his Essay of Scarabs, p. 27.  It may be
admitted that, in a country where Cats were gods, the religion of the
Mouse must have been struggling and oppressed.

[Illustration: 113.jpg]

{114a}  Strabo, xiii. 604.