mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our theory
than on that of De Gubernatis: 'The Pagan sun-god crushes under his foot
the Mouse of Night. When the cat's away, the mice may play; the shadows
of night dance when the moon is absent.' {117a} This is one of the
quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when the cat (the
moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) _cannot_ play: there is no light to
produce a shadow. As usually chances, the scholars who try to resolve
all the features of myth into physical phenomena do not agree among
themselves about the mouse. While the mouse is the night, according to
M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann's opinion the mouse is the lightning. He
argues that the lightning was originally regarded by the Aryan race as
the 'flashing tooth of a beast,' especially of a mouse. Afterwards men
came to identify the beast with his teeth, and, behold, the lightning and
the mouse are convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that
savages regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as
the result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent; {117b}
thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in
Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus; while rain is the milk of a
heavenly cow--an idea recurring in the 'Zend Avesta.' But it does not
follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all
the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a serpent
to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on earth, not
in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite unproved, that
any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a mouse's teeth. The
hypothesis is a jeu d'esprit, like the opposite hypothesis about the
mouse of Night. In these, and all the other current theories of the
Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship of ordinary mice, and such
small deer, has been either wholly neglected, or explained by the first
theory of symbolism that occurred to the conjecture of a civilised
observer. The facts of savage animal-worship, and their relations to