moon, or the dawn and the sun, or the lightning and the thunder-cloud, in
one arrangement or another, irresistibly suggested, to early Aryan minds,
the picture of a wooer, arriving in a hostile home, winning a maiden's
love, achieving adventures by her aid, fleeing with her from her angry
father and delaying his pursuit by various devices. Why the spring, the
moon, the lightning, the dawn--any of them or all of them--should have
suggested such a tale, let Scholars determine when they have reconciled
their own differences. It is more to our purpose to follow the myth
among Samoans, Algonquins, and Finns. None of these races speak an Aryan
language, and none can have been beguiled into telling the same sort of
tale by a disease of Aryan speech.

Samoa, where we find our story, is the name of a group of volcanic
islands in Central Polynesia. They are about 3,000 miles from Sidney,
were first observed by Europeans in 1722, and are as far removed as most
spots from direct Aryan influences. Our position is, however, that in
the shiftings and migrations of peoples, the Jason tale has somehow been
swept, like a piece of drift-wood, on to the coasts of Samoa. In the
islands, the tale has an epical form, and is chanted in a poem of twenty-
six stanzas. There is something Greek in the free and happy life of the
Samoans--something Greek, too, in this myth of theirs. There was once a
youth, Siati, famous for his singing, a young Thamyris of Samoa. But as,
according to Homer, 'the Muses met Thamyris the Thracian, and made an end
of his singing, for he boasted and said that he would vanquish even the
Muses if he sang against them,' so did the Samoan god of song envy Siati.
The god and the mortal sang a match: the daughter of the god was to be
the mortal's prize if he proved victorious. Siati won, and he set off,
riding on a shark, as Arion rode the dolphin, to seek the home of the
defeated deity. At length he reached the shores divine, and thither
strayed Puapae, daughter of the god, looking for her comb which she had