ZOOLOGICAL SUPERSTITIONS. 167 



accounts of an animal which, though exceedingly rare, is occasion- 

 ally met with in the mountains, but, from its supposed ferocity and 

 the fact of its being a cross between the devil and a bear, is given a 

 wide berth whenever it makes its dreaded appearance. Most startling 

 stories were told of its audacity : how it has been known to leap upon 

 a hunter and devour him in a twinkling ; often charging furiously into 

 a camp and playing all sorts of pranks on the goods and chattels of 

 the mountaineers. The general belief was, that the animal owes its 

 paternity to the old gentleman himself ; the most reasonable declaring 

 it to be a cross between the bear and wolf. Hunting one day with an 

 old Canadian trapper, he told me that, in a part of the mountains which 

 we were about to visit, his comrades once had a battle with a ' carca- 

 gieu,' which lasted upward of two hours, during which they fired a 

 pouchf ul of balls into the animal's body, which spat them out as fast 

 as they were shot in ! Two days after, as we were toiling up a steep 

 ridge after a band of mountain-sheep, my companion, who was in 

 advance, suddenly threw himself flat behind a rock and exclaimed in 

 a smothered tone, signaling me with his hand to keep down and con- 

 ceal myself, ' Sacre enfant de Garce, mais here's von dam carcagieu ! ' 

 I immediately cocked my rifle, and, advancing to the rock and peep- 

 ing over it, saw an animal, about the size of a large badger, engaged 

 in scraping up the earth about a dozen paces from where we were 

 concealed. From its appearance I at once recognized the mysterious 

 quadruped to be a ' glutton.' After I had sufficiently examined the 

 animal, I raised my rifle to shoot, when a louder than common 'Enfant 

 de Garce ! ' alarmed the animal, and it immediately ran off, when I 

 stood up and fired both barrels after it, but without effect, the at- 

 tempt exciting a derisive laugh from the Canadian, who exclaimed : 

 ' Pe gar, may be you got fifty balls ; vel, shoot 'em all at de dam carca- 

 gieu, and he not care a dam ! ' " 



But, after all, the foundation dogma, the existence of a wolf-like 

 animal of prodigious voracity, was less insane than incorrect, and as 

 such was renounced without regret. The joint-snake idiocy, on the 

 other hand, though knocked to pieces a hundred times, persists in re- 

 viving with symbolic promptitude. In the Rocky Mountains, on the 

 lower Mississippi, and all through the southern Alleghanies, farmers 

 and hunters still believe in the self-reconstructive power of a reptile 

 that survives dismemberment with the facility of a New York tram- 

 way ring, and, after picking up a jaw-bone here and a couple of ver- 

 tebras there, pursues its way rejoicing, and ready to segregate again 

 at a minute's notice. Time-honored dogmas are ridicule-proof ; and 

 how shall we, in this special case, avail ourselves of Schopenhauer's 

 maxim that the best way of refuting a superstition is to explain it ? 

 Should the strange delusion be founded on the habit of certain ophidi- 

 ans that make the pit of their oesophagus a place of refuge for their 

 new-born offspring ? Dozens of young snakelets have been seen crawl- 



