304 HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION. 



the worlds were derived from actual memory of the remote 

 time wlien various great animals^ generally thought to have 

 died out before the appearance of man upon the earth, were 

 still alive. The subject is hardly in a state to express a de- 

 cided opinion upon, but the evidence is worthy of the most 

 careful attention. 



Father Charlevoix^ whose ' History of New France ' was pub- 

 lished in 1744j records a North American legend of a great elk. 

 " There is current also among these barbarians a pleasant 

 enough tradition of a great Elk, beside whom others seem 

 like ants. He has, they say, legs so high that eight feet of 

 snow do not embarrass him : his skin is proof against all 

 sorts of weapons, and he has a sort of arm which comes out 

 of his shoulder, and which he uses as we do ours.^^ ^ 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 who had 

 never heard of the 

 use of an elephant's 

 trunk would ima- 

 gine from a sight 

 of the dead animal, 

 even if its trunk 

 were perfect, that 

 its use was to be 

 compared with that 

 of a man's arm. 

 The notion that 

 Fig- 30. the Indian story of 



the Great Elk was a real reminiscence of a Hving proboscidian, 

 is strengthened by a remarkable drawing, Fig. 30, from one of 



' Charlevoix, vol. v. p. 187. 



