Similarly the Maidu Indians of California
believe that a Great Man created the world and all its inhabitants,
and that lightning is nothing but the Great Man himself descending
swiftly out of heaven and rending the trees with his flaming arms.
It is a plausible theory that the reverence which the ancient
peoples of Europe paid to the oak, and the connexion which they
traced between the tree and their sky-god, were derived from the
much greater frequency with which the oak appears to be struck by
lightning than any other tree of our European forests. This
peculiarity of the tree has seemingly been established by a series
of observations instituted within recent years by scientific
enquirers who have no mythological theory to maintain. However we
may explain it, whether by the easier passage of electricity through
oak-wood than through any other timber, or in some other way, the
fact itself may well have attracted the notice of our rude
forefathers, who dwelt in the vast forests which then covered a
large part of Europe; and they might naturally account for it in
their simple religious way by supposing that the great sky-god, whom
they worshipped and whose awful voice they heard in the roll of
thunder, loved the oak above all the trees of the wood and often
descended into it from the murky cloud in a flash of lightning,
leaving a token of his presence or of his passage in the riven and
blackened trunk and the blasted foliage.
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