I do not venture too much in saying that it were easy to parallel every event in these American hero-myths, every phase of character of the personages they represent, with others drawn from Aryan and Egyptian legends long familiar to students, and which now are fully recognized as having in them nothing of the substance of history, but as pure creations of the religious imagination working on the processes of nature brought into relation to the hopes and fears of men. If this is so, is it not time that we dismiss, once for all, these American myths from the domain of historical traditions? Why should we try to make a king of Itzamna, an enlightened ruler of Quetzalcoatl, a cultured nation of the Toltecs, when the proof is of the strongest, that every one of these is an absolutely baseless fiction of mythology? Let it be understood, hereafter, that whoever uses these names in an historical sense betrays an ignorance of the subject he handles, which, were it in the better known field of Aryan or Egyptian lore, would at once convict him of not meriting the name of scholar. In European history the day has passed when it was allowable to construct primitive chronicles out of fairy tales and nature myths. The science of comparative mythology has assigned to these venerable stories a different, though not less noble, interpretation. How much longer must we wait to see the same canons of criticism applied to the products of the religious fancy of the red race? Furthermore, if the myths of the American nations are shown to be capable of a consistent interpretation by the principles of comparative mythology, let it be recognized that they are neither to be discarded because they resemble some familiar to their European conquerors, nor does that similarity mean that they are historically derived, the one from the other. Each is an independent growth, but as each is the reflex in a common psychical nature of the same phenomena, the same forms of expression were adopted to convey them. CHAPTER II. THE HERO-GODS OF THE ALGONKINS AND IROQUOIS. §1. _The Algonkin Myth of Michabo._ THE MYTH OF THE GIANT RABBIT--THE RABBIT CREATES THE WORLD--HE MARRIES THE MUSKRAT--BECOMES THE ALL-FATHER--DERIVATION OF MICHABO--OF WAJASHK, THE MUSKRAT--THE MYTH EXPLAINED--THE LIGHT-GOD AS GOD OF THE EAST--THE FOUR DIVINE BROTHERS--MYTH OF THE HUAROCHIRIS--THE DAY-MAKERS--MICHABO'S CONTESTS WITH HIS FATHER AND BROTHER--EXPLANATION OF THESE--THE SYMBOLIC FLINT STONE--MICHABO DESTROYS THE SERPENT KING--MEANING OF THIS MYTH--RELATIONS OF THE LIGHT-GOD AND WIND-GOD--MICHABO AS GOD OF WATERS AND FERTILITY--REPRESENTED AS A BEARDED MAN. §2. _The Iroquois Myth of Ioskeha._