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On the Translation of Myths Between the Old And: Marco

Compare with this the account given by Marco Polo of the same custom prevalent among the Miau-tze, or aborigines of China, as distinguished from their present occupants. Their reduction to submission is recorded in the early works on the country. "Proceeding five days' journey, in a westerly direction from Karazan, you enter the province of Kardandan belonging to the dominion of the great Khan, and of which the principal city is named Vochang (probably Yung-chang in the western part of Yunnan). These people have the following singular usage. As soon as a woman has been delivered of a child, and rising from her bed, has washed and swathed the infant, her husband immediately takes the place she has left, has the child beside him, and nurses it for forty days. In the meantime the friends and relations of the family pay to him their visits of congratulation; whilst the woman attends to the business of the house, carries victuals and drink to the husband in his bed, and suckles the infant at his side."t We find a reference in Hudibras to this grotesque practice, in which it is imputed, but erroneously, to the Chinese themselves, and it reappears on the western side of Europe, among those singular people the Basques, who have their * Knivet's description of the West Indies, Harris' Voyages, vol. i. p. 705. † T. Wright, Marco Polo, p. 267. Bohn, 1854. own especial Deluge tradition, and use a language which, according to Humboldt, approaches some of the dialects of the North American Indians more nearly than any other. They profess to trace the custom up to Aïtor or Noah, whose wife bore a son to him when they were in exile, and, being afraid to stay by herself for fear of being discovered and murdered, bade her husband take care of the child, while she went out to search for food and firing.

The change of name which prevails among the Chinese and Japanese in both sexes, at different periods of life, is also found upon the other continent, * where males and females when they come to years of discretion do not retain the names they had when young, and, if they do any remarkable deed, assume a new name upon it.

Less importance is to be attached to the coincidence of sun worship, Deluge tradition, and the preservation of ancestral ashes. These, though probably not, might have been indigenous; but we can hardly conceive this of serpent worship, which Mr. Fergusson suggests arose among a people of Turanian origin, from which it spread to every country or land of the Old World in which a Turanian settled. The coincidence between the serpent mounds of North America and such an one as is described by M. Phené in Argyllshire‡ is remarkable; and still more so is that between the Mexican myth of the fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water, with those current among the Egyptians and that of the four ages in the Hindu mythology.