This Father Ximenes derives from _win_, meaning to
grow, to gain, to increase,[223-1] in which the analogy to vegetable
life is not far off, an analogy strengthened by the myth of that stock,
which relates that the first of men were formed of the flour of
maize.[223-2]
In many other instances religious legend carries out this idea. The
mythical ancestor of the Caribs created his offspring by sowing the soil
with stones or with the fruit of the Mauritius palm, which sprouted
forth into men and women,[224-1] while the Yurucares, much of whose
mythology was perhaps borrowed from the Peruvians, clothed this crude
tenet in a somewhat more poetic form, fabling that at the beginning the
first of men were pegged, Ariel-like, in the knotty entrails of an
enormous hole, until the god Tiri--a second Prospero--released them by
cleaving it in twain.[224-2]
As in oriental legends the origin of man from the earth was veiled under
the story that he was the progeny of some mountain fecundated by the
embrace of Mithras or Jupiter, so the Indians often pointed to some
height or some cavern, as the spot whence the first of men issued, adult
and armed, from the womb of the All-mother Earth.
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