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MYTHOLOGY AMONG THE HOTTENTOTS.
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talk about Tsui-goab, particularly when tsui had ceased to mean red, and goab was at all events more familiar in the sense of knee than in that of dawn-what was more natural than that his name sore knee should give rise to questions and ready answers?
Other names shared the same fate. Nanub, meaning the streaming thunder-cloud, became a god or an ancestor, and sometimes meant the same as Tsui-goab. Gurub, thunder, not an imitative word, but derived from gu, to cover, was intended at first for the covering cloud and darkness (Sanskrit vritra), but soon assumed the same kind of personality as Nanub and Tsui-goab. All three are asked to give rain, and the other gifts which men ask from the powers above. Gurub is asked more particularly not to scold, Tsui-goab to give rain and food. If Tsui-goab was an old doctor, Gurub (Thunder) must have been another Hottentot, and Nanub (Cloud) another Bushman.
No one can deny that, as Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us, people are sometimes called Thunder and Lightning, Dawn and Cloud; and as reality is stranger than fiction, these persons, before they were changed into gods, may have met with such strange accidents as are recorded in the mythologies both of civilized and uncivilized races. Scholars and anthropologists must choose between the two systems of explaining the irrational in mythology; but it seems to us that Dr. Hahn's book will always form a very heavy weight in the scale of the scholars.
