336 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF MYTHS. 



brings in the same notion of the World-tortoise, but shows by 

 the -clifFerence of the accessory circumstances that it was not in 

 America a mere part of a particular story, but a mythological 

 conception which might be worked into an unlimited variety of 

 myths. The tale that the Man dan doctor told Catlin, was that 

 the earth was a large tortoise, that it earned dirt upon its back, 

 and that a tribe of people who are now dead, and whose faces 

 were white, used to dig down very deep in this ground to catch 

 badgers. One day they stuck a knife through the shell of the 

 tortoise, and it sank and sank till the water ran over its back, 

 and they were all drowned but one man.^ 



The Myth of the World- Tortoise is one of those which have 

 this great value in the comparison of Asiatic and American 

 Mythology, that it leaves not ,the least opening for the supposi- 

 tion of its having been carried by modern Europeans from the 

 Old to the New World. But it is to be seen, even from the 

 tales which have just been quoted, that it is mixed up in Ame- 

 rica with incidents and ideas more familiar to the European 

 mind ; and the stories told only with reference to the World- 

 Tortoise may serve to give a glimpse into the vast ethnological 

 field which lies in the Red Indian traditions, ready to be 

 worked. The Deluge, Cain and Abel, Ahriman and Ormuzd, 

 Romulus and Remus, all have their analogies among the le- 

 gends of these wild hunters. In the story which Charlevoix 

 tells just before that which I have quoted, there is Noah's 

 raven and Pandora's casket. 



To proceed now to the story of the Man swallowed by the 

 Fish. It is related in the Chippewa tale of the Little Monedo, 

 that there was once a little boy, of tiny stature, and growing 

 no bigger with years, but of monstrous strength. He had 

 done before various wondrous feats, and one day he waded into 

 the lake, and called " You of the red fins, come and swallow 

 me." Immediately that monstrous fish came and swallowed 

 him, and he, seeing his sister standing in despair on the shore, 

 called out to her, and she tied an old mocassin to a string, and 

 fastened it to a tree near the water's edge. The fish said to 

 the boy-man under water, " What is that floating ?" The boy- 



1 Catlin, vol. i. p. 181. 



