186 



R. S. Lull — Evolution of the Elephant. 



Indian tradition points but vaguely to the proboscidians, and 

 one cannot be sure that they are the creatures referred to, yet 

 it would be strange if such keen observers of nature as the 

 American aborigines should not have some tales of the mam- 

 moth and mastodon if their forefathers had seen them alive. 

 One tradition of the Shawnee Indians seems to allude to the 

 mastodon, especially as its teeth led the earlier observers to 

 suppose that it was a devourer of flesh. Albert Koch, in a 

 small pamphlet on the Missourium (mastodon) discovered by 



Fig. 11. Painting of Mammoth on wall at Combarelles; after MacCurdy. 



him in Osage county, Missouri, and published in 1843, gives 

 the tradition as follows : 



" Ten thousand moons ago, when nothing but gloomy forests 

 covered this land of the sleeping sun, — long before the pale 

 man, with thunder and fire at his command, rushed on the 

 wings of the wind to ruin this garden of nature, — a race of 

 animals were in being, huge as the frowning precipice, cruel 

 as the bloody panther, swift as the descending eagle, and ter- 

 rible as the angel of night. The pine crushed beneath their 

 feet and the lakes shrunk when they slaked their thirst ; the 

 forceful javelin in vain was hurled, and the barbed arrows fell 

 harmlessly from their sides. Forests were laid waste at a meal 

 and villages inhabited by man were destroyed in a moment. 



