HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION. 303 



"■maggots/'^ a name whichj of course, dates from tlie recent 

 time when foreigners brought it to tlie country. When, there- 

 fore, we are told in the Borneo tale that the first Dayak who 

 saw grains of rice took them for maggots, we are, I think, 

 justified in believing this notion to be in Borneo, as elsewhere, 

 a real reminiscence of the introduction of rice into the country, 

 though this piece of actual history comes to us woven into the 

 texture of an ancient myth. There is reason to suppose that 

 rice was introduced into the Malay islands from Asia; in 

 Marsden's time it had not been adopted even in Engano and 

 Batu, which are islands close to Sumatra.^ 



When a tradition is once firmly planted among the legendary 

 lore of a tribe, there seems scarcely any limit to the time 

 through which it may be kept up by continual repetition from 

 one generation to the next; unless such an event as the 

 coming of a stronger and more highly cultivated race entirely 

 upsets the old state of society, and destroys the old landmarks. 

 The traditions of the Polynesians, for instance, seem often to 

 be of great age, for they occur among the natives of distant 

 islands whose languages have had time to diverge widely from 

 a common origin; but even the most long-lived stories are 

 fast disappearing, under European influence, from the memory 

 of the people. The historical value of a tradition does not of 

 necessity vary inversely with its age, and indeed this rule-of- 

 three test goes for very little, for some very old stories are, 

 beyond a doubt, of greater historical value than other very 

 new ones current in the same tribe. 



There is even a certain amount of evidence which tends to 

 prove that the memory of the huge animals of the quaternary 

 period has been preserved up to modern times in popular tra- 

 dition. It is but quite lately that the fact of man having lived 

 on the earth at the same time with the mammoth has become 

 a generally received opinion, though its probability has been 

 seen by a few far-sighted thinkers for many years past, and it 

 had been suggested long before the late discoveries in the 

 Drift-beds, that several traditions, found in diflFerent parts of 



J Eyre, vol. ii. p. 393. 



^ Marsden, pp. 467, 474. See Ellis, ' Madagascar,' toI. i. p. 39. 



