310 HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OP OBSERVATION. 



ing the blood. The ancient book Sliin-y -King , speaks of this 

 animal in the following terms : — There is in the extreme 

 north, among the snows and ice which cover this region, a shu 

 (rat), which weighs up to a thousand pounds, its flesh is very 

 good for those who are heated. The Tse-shu calls it fen-shu, 

 and speaks of another kind which is of less size ; it is only, 

 says this authority, as large as a buffalo, it burrows like the 

 moles, shuns the light, and almost always stays in its under- 

 ground caves. It is said that it would die if it saw the light of 

 the sun, or even of the moon.^'^ 



The story of the mammoth being a burrowing animal, which 

 has arisen from the finding its remains exposed in clifis or banks 

 deep below the surface, becomes the more valuable as evidence 

 of the growth of myths, from the fact that on the other side of 

 the world a like story has developed itself from a like origin. 

 When Darwin visited certain cliffs of the River Parana, between 

 Buenos Ayres and Santa Fe, where many bones of Mastodons 

 are found, he says, " The men who took me in the canoe, said 

 they had long known of these skeletons, and had often won- 

 dered how they had got there : the necessity of a theory being 

 felt, they came to the conclusion that, like the bizcacha, the 

 mastodon was formerly a burrowing animal.'^ ^ The bizcacha is 

 a small rabbit-like rodent, common on the Pampas. 



Other fossil remains beside those of the mammoth have given 

 rise to myths of observation in Siberia. The curved tusks of 

 the Rhinocero-<f tichorhinus are something like the claws of a 

 monstrous bird, and when both tusks are found united by part 

 of the skull, the whole might very well be taken by a man to- 

 tally ignorant of anatomy, for the bird's foot with two claws. 

 The Siberians not only believe the horns of the rhinoceros to 

 be the claws of an enormous bird, and call them '"^ bird's claws '' 

 accordingly, but a family of myths has developed itself out of 

 this belief, how these winged monsters lived in the country in 

 the time of the ancestors of the present inhabitants, who fought 

 with them for the possession of the land. One story tells how 

 the country was wasted by one of them, till a wise man fixed a 



^ Mem. cone, les Climois, vol. iv. p. 481. Klemm, C. G., vol. vi. p. 471. 

 - Darwin, p. 127. 



