nursery-song, who, when he fell from his elevated position on the wall--

"Not all the king's horses, Nor all the king's men, Can ever make whole again."

In another Russian legend, Perun, the thunder-god, destroys the devils with _stone_ hammers. On Ilya's day, the peasants offer him a roasted animal, which is cut up and _scattered over the fields_,[2] just as we have seen the great dragon or serpent cut to pieces and scattered over the world.

Mr. Christy found at Bou-Merzoug, on the plateau of the Atlas, in Northern Africa, in a bare, deserted, stony place among the mountains, a collection of fifteen hundred tombs, made of rude limestone slabs, set up with one slab to form a roof, so as to make perfect dolmens--closed chambers--where the bodies were packed in.

"Tradition says that a wicked people lived there, and for their sins _stones were rained upon them from heaven;_ so they built these chambers to creep into."[3]

In addition to the legend of "Phaëton," already given, Ovid derived from the legends of his race another story,

[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 328.

2. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 400.

3. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 222.]

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which seems to have had reference to the same event. He says (Fable XI):

"After the men who came from the Tyrian nation had touched this grove with ill-fated steps, and the urn let down into the water made a splash, the _azure dragon_ stretched forth his head from the deep cave, and uttered dreadful hissings."

We are reminded of the flying monster of Hesiod, which roared and hissed so terribly.

Ovid continues:

"The urns dropped from their hands, and the blood left their bodies, and a sudden trembling seized their astonished limbs. He wreathes his scaly orbs in rolling spirals, and, with a spring, becomes twisted into mighty folds; and, uprearing himself from below the middle into the light air, he looks down upon all the grove, and is of" (as) "large size, as, if you were to look on him entire, the _serpent_ which separates the two Bears" (the constellations).

He slays the Phœnicians; "some he kills with his sting, some with his long folds, some breathed upon by the venom of his baleful poison."

Cadmus casts a huge stone, as big as a millstone, against him, but it falls harmless upon his scales, "that were like a coat-of-mail"; then Cadmus pierced him with his spear. In his fall he crushes the forests; the blood flows from his poisonous palate and changes the color of the grass. He is slain.

Then, under the advice of Pallas, Cadmus _sows the earth with the dragon's teeth,_ "_under the earth turned up_, as the seeds of a future people." Afterward, the earth begins to move, and armed men rise up; they slay Cadmus, and then fight with and slay each other.

This seems to be a recollection of the comet, and the stones falling from heaven; and upon the land so afflicted

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subsequently a warlike and aggressive and quarrelsome race of men springs up.

In the contest of Hercules with the Lygians, on the road from Caucasus _to the Hesperides_, "there is an attempt to explain mythically the origin of the round quartz blocks in the Lygian field of stones, at the mouth of the Rhône."[1]

In the "Prometheus Delivered" of Æsechylus, Jupiter draws together a cloud, and causes "the district round about to be _covered with a shower of round stones_."[2]

The legends of Europe refer to a race buried under sand and earth:

"The inhabitants of Central Europe and Teutonic races who came late to England, place their mythical heroes _under ground in caves_, in vaults beneath enchanted castles, or in _mounds_ which open and show their buried inhabitants alive and busy about the avocations of earthly men. . . . In Morayshire _the buried race are supposed to have been buried under the sand-hills_, as they are in some parts of Brittany."[3]

Turning again to America, we find, in the great prayer of the Aztecs