No early race had the idea of an absolute beginning. {32} The attempt made was simply to carry things back to different conditions, to a less developed state of things, and then to trace the larger steps by means of which the later world, as they saw it, came about. Those races which had little power for abstract thinking and had achieved few impersonal ideas kept very near to concrete phenomena and explained their own origin in terms of a mythical ancestor, or animal magician, while they left the earth and the sky very much as it was. The Iroquois Indians, for instance, believed that their original female ancestress fell from heaven. There was no land to receive her, but it suddenly bubbled up under her feet and waxed bigger, so that ere long a whole country was visible. Other branches of the tribe held that otters and beavers hastened to dig up enough earth from beneath the water to provide her with an island on which to dwell. The Athapascans of Northwestern Canada asserted that a raven, whose eyes were fire, whose glances were lightning, and the clapping of whose wings was thunder, descended to the ocean. Instantly, the earth arose and remained floating on the surface of the waters. It was from this Being that the tribe traced its descent. We must remember how near akin are animals and men at this stage of human development. Once throw oneself into the atmosphere of myth and it is not difficult to comprehend how such stories grew up. But we are more interested in tracing the development of stories of creation from primitive types to subtler and more abstract forms; and a collection of savage folk-lore on the subject would, therefore, be of little value. Let us pass, then, to the accounts given by races which have played a part in history. {33}