+254+. Reverence for animals persists in attenuated form in civilized nations in various superstitions connected with them. Their appearances and their cries are believed to portend success or disaster. The great number of "signs" recognized and relied on by uneducated and educated persons at the present day bear witness to the strong hold that the cult of animals had on early man.[456] +255+. It is in keeping with early ideas that savages often, perhaps generally, ascribe the creation or construction of the world (so far as they know it) to animals. The creation (whether by beasts or by other beings) is not conceived of as produced out of nothing; there is always preëxisting material, the origin of which is not explained; primitive thought seems not to have considered the possibility of a situation in which nothing existed. The "creation" conceived of is the arrangement of existing material into the forms familiar to man--every tribe accounting thus for its own environment. The origin of the land, of mountains, defiles, lakes, rivers, trees, rocks, sun, moon, and stars, wind and rain, human beings and lower animals, and sometimes of social organizations and ceremonies, is explained in some way natural to the thought of the time and place. Not all these details occur in the cosmogony of every tribe or clan, but the purpose of every cosmogony is to account for everything in the origin of which the people are interested. +256+. The creator in the cosmogonies known to us is not always an animal--he is sometimes a man, sometimes a god; it is possible, however, that human and divine creators are the successors of original animal creators. In Central Australia the production of certain natural features of the country and the establishment of certain customs are ascribed to ancestors, mythical beings of the remote past, creatures both animal and human, or rather, either animal or human--possibly animals moving toward the anthropomorphic stage.[457] However this may be, there are instances in which the creator is an animal pure and simple, though, of course, endowed with extraordinary powers. The beast to which the demiurgic function is assigned is selected, it would seem, on the ground of some peculiar skill or other power it is supposed to possess; naturally the reason for the choice is not always apparent. For the Ainu the demiurge is the water wagtail;[458] for the Navahos and in California,[459] the coyote or prairie wolf; among the Lenni-Lenâpé, the wolf.[460] Various animals--as elephants, boars, turtles, snakes--are supposed to bear the world on their backs. The grounds of such opinions, resting on remote social conditions, are obscure.