590 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



and they found round the cave in which the creature had 

 lived bones of human beings strewn about.* Now, it is ex- 

 ceedingly probable that the Maoris, seeing the huge bones of 

 the Dinornis lying on the surface, as we even now find them 

 (when uncovered?), constructed on the immensity of the 

 remains a myth about a monstrous man-eating bird, unaware 

 that the Dinornis was wingless. It is improbable that the 

 remains of Harpagornis, comparatively scarce and unremark- 

 able, should have suggested the myth. In the ancient world 

 the discovery of fossil bones often either originated or became 

 the illustrations of myth, just as Marcus Scaurus brought to 

 Borne from Joppa the bones of the monster prevented by 

 Perseus from devouring Andromeda, and as the rib-bone of 

 the whale still preserved in St. Mary Bedcliffe Church is 

 supposed to have belonged to the Dun Cow slain by Guy, 

 Earl of Warwick. Numberless such instances could be cited 

 if necessary. 



On the other hand, there are myths of observation in 

 which, probably, the legend is not so much an accretion to 

 the natural fact as a slightlv altered transmission of actual 

 record. The savage tribes of Brazil tell of the Curupira, an 

 enormous monkey, covered with long shaggy hair, and with a 

 bright-red face. No such animal now inhabits Brazil ; but 

 geologists say that in the Post-pliocene period such a creature 

 existed in that country, and may, possibly, have lived down 

 to the time when man came into being. A tradition has 

 been preserved by Father Charlevoix,! from North American 

 sources, concerning a great elk. He says, " There is current 

 also among the barbarians a pleasant enough tradition of a 

 great elk, beside whom others seem but ants. He has, they 

 say, legs so high that 8ft. of snow did not embarrass him, 

 his skin is proof against all sorts of w r eapons, and he has a 

 sort of arm which comes out of his shoulder, and which he 

 uses as we do ours." Mr. Tylor, speaking of this legend, 

 says, "It is hard to imagine that anything but the actual 

 sight of a live elephant can have given rise to this tradition. 

 The suggestion that it might have been founded on the sight 

 of a mammoth frozen with his flesh and skin, as they are 

 found in Siberia, is not tenable, for the trunks and tails of 

 these animals perish first, and are not preserved like the more 

 solid parts ; so that the Asiatic myths which have grown out 

 of the finding of these frozen beasts know nothing of such 

 appendages. Moreover, no savage w 7 ho had never heard of 

 the use of an elephant's trunk would imagine from a sight of 

 the dead animal, even if its trunk were perfect, that its use 



* White's " Ancient History of the Maori," vol. ii., p. 33. 

 t " History of New France," vol. v., p. 187. 



