Orient, the Dawn--which you please, as all distinctly refer to the one
original idea, the Bringer of Light and Sight, of knowledge and life. In
time this meaning became obscured, and the idea of the rabbit, whose name
was drawn probably from the same root, as in the northern winters its fur
becomes white, was substituted, and so the myth of light degenerated into
an animal fable.

I believe that a similar analysis will explain the part which the muskrat
plays in the story. She it is who brings up the speck of mud from the
bottom of the primal ocean, and from this speck the world is formed by him
whom we now see was the Lord of the Light and the Day, and subsequently
she becomes the mother of his sons. The word for muskrat in Algonkin is
_wajashk_, the first letter of which often suffers elision, as in _nin
nod-ajashkwe_, I hunt muskrats. But this is almost the word for mud, wet
earth, soil, _ajishki_. There is no reasonable doubt but that here again
otosis and personification came in and gave the form and name of an animal
to the original simple statement.

That statement was that from wet mud dried by the sunlight, the solid
earth was formed; and again, that this damp soil was warmed and fertilized
by the sunlight, so that from it sprang organic life, even man himself,
who in so many mythologies is "the earth born," _homo ab humo, homo
chamaigenes_.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mr. J. Hammond Trumbull has pointed out that in Algonkin the
words for father, _osh_, mother, _okas_, and earth, _ohke_ (Narraganset
dialect), can all be derived, according to the regular rules of Algonkin
grammar, from the same verbal root, signifying "to come out of, or from."
(Note to Roger Williams' _Key into the Language of America_, p. 56). Thus
the earth was, in their language, the parent of the race, and what more