into pieces. He scattered the fragments over the earth, and from them grew
fruitful vines.

A myth which, like this, introduces the flint stone as in some way
connected with the early creative forces of nature, recurs at other
localities on the American continent very remote from the home of the
Algonkins. In the calendar of the Aztecs the day and god Tecpatl, the
Flint-Stone, held a prominent position. According to their myths such a
stone fell from heaven at the beginning of things and broke into sixteen
hundred pieces, each of which became a god. The Hun-pic-tok, Eight
Thousand Flints, of the Mayas, and the Toh of the Kiches, point to the
same association.[1]

[Footnote 1: Brasseur de Bourbourg, _Dissertation sur les Mythes de
l'Antiquite Americaine_, §vii.]

Probably the association of ideas was not with the flint as a fire-stone,
though the fact that a piece of flint struck with a nodule of pyrites will
emit a spark was not unknown. But the flint was everywhere employed for
arrow and lance heads. The flashes of light, the lightning, anything that
darted swiftly and struck violently, was compared to the hurtling arrow or
the whizzing lance. Especially did this apply to the phenomenon of the
lightning. The belief that a stone is shot from the sky with each
thunderclap is shown in our word "thunderbolt," and even yet the vulgar in
many countries point out certain forms of stones as derived from this
source. As the refreshing rain which accompanies the thunder gust instills
new life into vegetation, and covers the ground parched by summer droughts
with leaves and grass, so the statement in the myth that the fragments of
the flint-stone grew into fruitful vines is an obvious figure of speech
which at first expressed the fertilizing effects of the summer showers.