HISTOEICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION. 305 



the Mexican picture-writings. It represents a masked priest 

 sacrificing a liumau victim, and Humboldt copies it iu the 

 ' Vues des Cordilleres' with the following remarks : — " I should 

 not have had this hideous scene engraved, were it not that the 

 disguise of the sacrificing priest presents some remarkable and 

 apparently not accidental resemblances with the Hindoo Ganesa 

 [the elephant-headed god of wisdom] . The Mexicans used 

 masks imitating the shape of the heads of the serpent, the 

 crocodile, or the jaguar. One seems to recognize in the sacri- 

 ficer's mask the trunk of an elephant or some pachyderm re- 

 sembling it in the shape of the head, but with an upper jaw 

 furnished with incisive teeth. The snout of the tapir no doubt 

 protrudes a little more than that of our pigs, but it is a long 

 way from the tapir's snout to the trunk figured in the ' Codex 

 Borgianus.' Had the peoples of Aztlan, derived from Asia, 

 some vague notions of the elephant, or, as seems to me much 

 less probable, did their traditions reach back to the time when 

 America was still inhabited by these gigantic animals, whose 

 petrified skeletons are found buried in the marly ground on 

 the very ridge of the Mexican Cordilleras ?"i It may be worth 

 while to notice in connection with Humboldt's remarks, that 

 when Mr. Bates showed a picture of an elephant to some South 

 American Indians, they settled it that the creature must be a 

 large kind of tapir. ^ 



Attempts have been made by other writers to connect the 

 memory of animals now extinct, with mythological tales cur- 

 rent in the regions to which they belong. Dr. Falconer is dis- 

 posed to connect the huge elephant-fighting and world-bearing 

 tortoises of the Hindoo mythology with a recollection of the time 

 when his monstrous Himalayan tortoise, the Colossochelys Atlas, 

 the restoration of which forms so striking an object in the British 

 Museum, was still alive. ^ The savage tribes of Brazil have 

 traditions about a being whom they call the Curupira. " Some- 

 times he is described as a kind of orang-otang, being covered 

 with long, shaggy hair, and living in trees. At others he is 



' Humboldt, Vues des Cord., pi. xv. ; Borgia MS. in Kingsborougli, vol. iii. 



^ Bates, ' Amazons,' vol. ii. p. 128. 



3 Falconer, in Proc. Zool. Son., part xii., 1844, p. 86. 



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