of them seem to be given by art and adopted by nature,—borrowing and adaptation being, for the savage as for the civilized man, more facile than new thinking.
In every considerable collection of Indian stories there are many adaptations of common ideas and incidents. In different regions this basic material comes to characteristic forms of expression. Finally, in the continent as a whole, viewed as one great region, there is a generally definable scheme, within which the mythic conceptions of the North American fall into place. It is in this sense, and with reference to this scheme, that we may speak of a North American Indian mythological system.
On the side of cosmology, the scheme has already been indicated. There is a world above, the home of the Sky Father and of the celestial powers; there is a world below, the embodiment of the Earth Mother and the abode of the dead; there is the central plane of the earth, and there are the genii of its Quarters. But cosmology serves only to define the theatre; it does not give the action. Cosmogony is the essential drama. In the Indian scheme the beginning is seldom absolute. A few tribes recognize a creator who makes or a procreator who generates the world and its inhabitants; but the usual conception is either of a pre-existent sky-world, peopled with the images of the beings of an earth-world yet to come into being, or else of a kind of cosmic womb from which the First People were to have their origin. In the former type of legend, the action begins with the descent of a heaven-born Titaness; in the latter, the first act portrays the ascent of the ancestral beings from the place of generation. Uniformly, the next act of the world drama details the deeds of a hero or of twin heroes who are the shapers and lawgivers of the habitable earth. They conquer the primitive monsters and set in order the furniture of creation; quite generally, one of them is slain, and passes to the underworld to become its Plutonian lord. The theft of fire, the origin of death, the liberation of the animals, the giving of the arts, the institution of rites are all
