Turning to India from the Mediterranean basin, and the Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian tribes on its coasts, we find that the mouse was the sacred animal of Rudra. 'The mouse, Rudra, is thy beast,' says the Yajur Veda, as rendered by Grohmann in his _Apollo Smintheus_. Grohmann recognises in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics of Apollo. In later Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of Ganeça, who, like Apollo Smintheus, is represented in art with his foot upon a mouse. Such are the chief appearances of the mouse in ancient religion. If he really was a Semitic totem, it may, perhaps, be argued that his prevalence in connection with Apollo is the result of a Semitic leaven in Hellenism. Hellenic invaders may have found Semitic mouse-tribes at home, and incorporated the alien stock deity with their own Apollo-worship. In that case the mouse, while still originally a totem, would not be an Aryan totem. But probably the myths and rites of the mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our theory than on that of De Gubernatis: 'The Pagan Sun-god crushes under his foot the Mouse of Night. When the cat's away, the mice may play; the shadows of night dance when the moon is absent.'[137] This is one of the quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when the cat (the moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) _cannot_ play: there is no light to produce a shadow. As usually chances, the Scholars who try to resolve all the features of myth into physical phenomena do not agree among themselves about the mouse. While the mouse is the night according to M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann's opinion the mouse is the lightning. He argues that the lightning was originally regarded by the Aryan race as the 'flashing tooth of a beast,' especially of a mouse. Afterwards men came to identify the beast with his teeth, and, behold the lightning and the mouse are convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that savages regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent;[138] thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus; while rain is the milk of a heavenly cow--an idea recurring in the _Zend Avesta_. But it does not follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a serpent to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on earth, not in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite unproved, that any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a mouse's teeth. The hypothesis is a _jeu d'esprit_, like the opposite hypothesis about the mouse of Night. In these, and all the other current theories of the Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship of ordinary mice, and such small deer, has been either wholly neglected, or explained by the first theory of symbolism that occurred