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Thence sprang cocoanut trees, with a fanciful likeness to a human face face of Tuna on the nut. But still, why Tuna? How could the moon love an eel, except on my own general principle of savage 'levelling up' of all life in all nature? In my opinion, the Mangaians wanted a fable to account for the resemblance of a cocoanut to the human head a resemblance noted, as I show, in our own popular slang.
Having the necessary savage major premise in their minds, 'All life is on a level and interchangeable, the Mangaians thought well to say that the head-like cocoanut sprang from the head of her lover, an eel, cut off by Ina. The myth accounts, I think, for the peculiarities of the cocoanut, rather than for the name 'brains of Tuna; for we still ask, 'Why of Tuna in particular?
In truth "creation from fragments of a fabulous anthropomorphic being is common to Chaldeans, Iroquois, Egyptians, Greeks, Tinnehs, Mangaians, and Aryan Indians," and from that fact a connexion between ancient Japan and West Asia might be deduced by reference to the beings formed out of the parts: of the fire Kami's body when Izanagi put him to the sword.
In Amboyna and Uliase, two islands near the equator, where necessarily there is little or no shadow cast at noon, the people make it a rule not to go out of the house at mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may lose the shadow of his soul. The Mangaians tell of a mighty warrior, Tukaitawa, whose strength waxed and waned with the length of his shadow.
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