after the arrival of Night should make Dawn a necessary. Next day Qat's
brothers saw the sun crawl away west, and presently Night came creeping
up from the sea. 'What is this?' cried the brothers. 'It is Night,'
said Qat; 'sit down, and when you feel something in your eyes, lie down
and keep quiet.' So they went to sleep. 'When Night had lasted long
enough, Qat took a piece of red obsidian, and cut the darkness, and the
Dawn came out.' {56}

Night is more or less personal in this tale, and solid enough to be cut,
so as to let the Dawn out. This savage conception of night, as the
swallower and disgorger, might start the notion of other swallowing and
disgorging beings. Again the Bushmen, and other savage peoples, account
for certain celestial phenomena by saying that 'a big star has swallowed
his daughter, and spit her out again.' While natural phenomena,
explained on savage principles, might give the data of the swallow-myth,
we must not conclude that all beings to whom the story is attached are,
therefore, the Night. On this principle Cronus would be the Night, and
so would the wolf in Grimm. For our purposes it is enough that the feat
of Cronus is a feat congenial to the savage fancy and repugnant to the
civilised Greeks who found themselves in possession of the myth. Beyond
this, and beyond the inference that the Cronus myth was first evolved by
people to whom it seemed quite natural, that is, by savages, we do not
pretend to go in our interpretation.

* * * * *

To end our examination of the Myth of Cronus, we may compare the
solutions offered by scholars. As a rule, these solutions are based on
the philological analysis of the names in the story. It will be seen
that very various and absolutely inconsistent etymologies and meanings of