658 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Bar-nash-ditur (man of the mountain), which can live only through 

 the umbilical cord, and dies if it is broken. Maimonides says the 

 Adone-hasadeh are animals resembling men. Travelers wrote of the 

 animal that it talked much and intelligently, even with a human ar- 

 ticulation. In Arabic it is called alnanas, which Buxdorf translated 

 vdvog, nanos, dwarf (in Talmudic nanos means shut). Clearness is 

 lent to the supposition that these accounts referred to apes by the fact 

 that E. Tison, in 1698, methodically dissected a female chimpanzee 

 from Angola in Africa, and called it a pygmy, comparing it with the 

 accounts of the ancients respecting alleged dwarf races in Ethiopia, 

 which races, however, modern ethnologists recognize in several real 

 living tribes of diminutive size. Simson asserts in a note to Kilajim, 

 8, 5, that he had heard that the Abne-hasadeh was the animal Jodua, 

 through a bone of which, according to Talmud Synhedrin 65, a, b, the 

 wizards mentioned in Leviticus xix, 31, and xx, 6, and in Deuteron- 

 omy xviii, 11, placing them' in their mouths, were able to projuhesy ; 

 " and how a great cord rises out of a root in the ground on which the 

 Jodua grows like a squash or melon ; his face, body, and limbs are like 

 those of a man, but the navel is joined to the cord that rises out of the 

 earth-root. No being dare venture within reach of the cord, for fear of 

 being destroyed,* and the animal devastates everything within the circle 

 which the cord describes. No man can approach it with safety ; and, 

 if any one wishes to overcome it, he must endeavor to lay hold of the 

 cord and break it, or shoot through it from a distance with an arrow, 

 when the animal dies." We apparently have to deal here with a con- 

 glomeration of fables of different times and places. There are, first, 

 exaggerations in the sketches of the great anthropoid apes, from Hanno 

 in his periplus to the fanciful Du Chaillu, not to speak of the fabu- 

 lous impossible accounts that appear in Pliny, JElian, and other an- 

 cient writers. The Adne-hasacleh, or Jodua, except as to the navel- 

 cord, corresponds well with the authentic accounts of the gorilla as 

 we find them in the works of Brehm, Dr. Franquet, R. Burton, Lenz, 

 Giirsfeld, and Koppenfels. By means of the navel-cord we may rec- 

 ognize in the Adne-hasadeh a plant-animal, a kind of Boranetz, of 

 the fable of which Lewysohn, in his " Biology," introduces the follow- 

 ing account : " In this steppe or desert (Lesser and Great Tartary) is 

 found the Boranetz, or Bornitch, as some call it, a fruit as large as a 

 melon, having the form of a sheep (whence it gets the name of Boran, 

 Russian for sheep), with a head, feet, and snout, and, what is remark- 

 able, this fruit has on the outside a skin covered with white, bright, 

 and very finely tinted hair, firm as silk. These skins are valued very 

 highly by the Tartars and Russians. This Boranetz grows on a bush 

 three feet high, which implants itself in the navel of the sheep. The 

 fruit turns, like a summer flower, as if it would incline itself toward the 

 plants near it. They tell of it, that if the grass and plants around it 

 dry up, the fruit perishes for want of food and support ; and the same 



