312 HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OP OBSERVATION. 



to be griffins' claws^ were mounted in gold and silver in Eu- 

 rope in the middle ages^ and preserved as relics in churclies. 

 There is or was one in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 

 mounted on little gilt claws, which sufficiently show what it 

 was thought to be. 



The Chinese idea that the mammoth was a huge rat, and the 

 very name of " Mother of Mice" given to it, fit curiously with 

 a set of North American stories, which may have a like origin 

 in the finding of fossil remains of enormous size. The name of 

 the " Pere aux Boeufs," probably the translation of a native 

 Indian name, was given to an extinct animal whose huge bones 

 were found on the banks of the Ohio.^ The Indians of New 

 France, Father Paul le Jeune relates in 1685, " say besides, that 

 all the animals of each species have an elder brother, who is as 

 the beginning and origin of all the race, and this elder brother 

 is marvellously great and powerful. The elder brother of the 

 beavers, they told me, is perhaps as big as our hut."^ There 

 are current among the Iroquois, says Morgan, fables of a buf- 

 falo of such huge dimensions as to thresh down the forest in 

 his march.^ And lastly, in one of the North American tales 

 of the Sun-Catcher, we find a creature to which the name of 

 " Mother of Mice" may well belong. When the Sun was to be 

 set free from the snare, the animals debated who should go up 

 and sever the cord, and the dormouse went, " for at this time 

 the dormouse was the largest animal in the world j when it 

 stood up it looked like a mountain." The whole story, which 

 goes on to tell how it has come to pass that the dormice are 

 but small creatures now, is given here in the next chapter. 



The native tribes of the lower end of South America ex- 

 plained the reason why they, unhke the Spaniards, had no 

 herds of cattle in their country, by an interesting story, which 

 has the air of a myth of observation founded upon the exami- 

 nation of caves containing fossil bones. They had a multipli- 

 city of inferior deities below the two great powers of Good and 

 Evil, who, there as elsewhere on the American continent, are 



' Buffon, Hist. -Nat. (ed. Sonnini), vol. xxviii. p. 264. 

 ^ Le Jeune, Eelalions (1634), vol. i. p. 46. 

 ' Morgan, p. 166. 



