It may be supposed that these crude fancies embody a dim recognition of the physical forces and objects personified under the forms of deities, and a rude attempt to account for their genesis as a natural process.
Careful attempts, based on new scientific truths, an made to explain the genesis of the world as a natural process.
There can be no doubt that Eabani, who symbolizes primeval man, was a figure originally entirely independent of Gilgamesh, but his story was incorporated into the epic by that natural process to be observed in the national epics of other peoples, which tends to connect the favourite hero with all kinds of tales that for one reason or the other become embedded in the popular mind.
The temperature at which the limb is kept, no doubt, favours and hastens the natural process of destruction, so that putrefaction shows itself sooner than would be the case with a dead tissue removed from the body and kept at a lower temperature.
This wasting may be general or local - continuously from the embryonic period there is this natural process of displacement and decay of tissues going on in the growing organism.