306 HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION. 



said to have cloven feet, and a brigM red face. He has a wife 

 and children, and sometimes comes down to the ro?as to steal 

 the mandioca." Similar to, or the same as this being, is the 

 Cay^Dor, whom the Indians, in their masquerades, represent as 

 a bulky, misshapen monster, with red skin and long shaggy 

 red hair, hanging halfway down his back.^ With reference to 

 these Brazilian stories, Mr. Carter Blake remarks — " In Brazil 

 the Indians had a tradition of a gigantic anthropoid ape, the 

 caypore, which represented the African gorilla. No such ape 

 exists in the present day ; but in the post-pliocene in Brazil, 

 remains have been preserved of an extinct ape {Protopithecus 

 antiquum) four feet high, which might possibly have lived down 

 to the human period, and formed the subject of the tradition."^ 

 Lastly, Colonel Hamilton Smith has collected a quantity of evi- 

 dence, thought by him to bear on the preservation of the 

 memory of extinct creatures, adding to Father Charlevoix's 

 great Elk, and the Pere aux Boeufs from Buffon, a North Ame- 

 rican " Naked Bear," and an East Indian " Elephant-Horse," 

 etc., and endeavouring- to identify them in nature.^ 



To proceed now from the traditions which have, or may set 

 up some sort of claim to have, a historical foundation, to the 

 Myths of Observation, which are so often liable to be confounded 

 with them : it is to be noticed that if the inference from 

 facts, which forms the basis of such a myth, should happen to 

 be a correct one, and if the story should also happen to have 

 fairly dropped out of sight the evidence out of which it grew, 

 its separation from a real tradition of events may be hardly 

 possible. Fortunately for the Ethnologist, it is very common 

 for such stories to betray their unhistoric origin in one or both 

 of these ways, either by recording things which seemed indeed 

 probable when the myths arose, but which modern knowledge 

 repudiates, or by having embodied with them the facts which 

 have been appealed to for ages as confirmation of their truth, 

 but which we are now in a position to recognize at once as the 

 very basis on which their mythical structure was raised. 



* Bates, ' Amazons,' toI. i. p. 73 ; vol. ii. p. 204. 

 " C. Carter Blake in Tr. Eth. Soc. 1863, p. 169. 

 3 C. Hamilton Smith, Nat. Hist, of Human Sp., pp. 104-6. 



