There is irrefragable evidence that these myths and this ideal of the hero-god, were intimately known and widely current in America long before any one of its millions of inhabitants had ever seen a white man.

Nor is there any difficulty in explaining this, when we divest these figures of the fanciful garbs in which they have been clothed by the religious imagination, and recognize what are the phenomena on which they are based, and the physical processes whose histories they embody.

To show this I will offer, in the most concise terms, my interpretation of their main details.
The most important of all things to life is _Light_.

This the primitive savage felt, and, personifying it, he made Light his chief god.

The beginning of the day served, by analogy, for the beginning of the world.
Light comes before the sun, brings it forth, creates it, as it were.