324 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



frost-giants of ice and snow — by the supporters of Odin and the ^sir 

 in the Norse mythology. It is instructive to trace these unhistorical 

 narratives back to their physical origin ; it is suggestive to find that 

 such origin is rational, and does not rest upon any purely mythical 

 base. Such a colossal race of beings did exist in the old times ; they 

 were, however, the gigantic mastodons, etc., which man drove before 

 him and exterminated. When M. Albert Koch, in the year 1842, 

 brought the so-called Missouriim" skeleton to England, which after- 

 wards was demonstrated to be identical with the Mastodon Ohioticus, 

 and now form.s a conspicuous object in the British Museum, amongst 

 many other dubious anecdotes recounted by him, was one, that with 

 the bones of Mastodon had been found an arrowhead, proving appa- 

 roDtly the existence of mankind in America contemporaneous with 

 this great elephantine animal. This marvellous " Yankee cram " was 

 ridiculed bv English geologists in 1842 as quite preposterous. jNow, 

 however, in 1862, we look at the subject with more cautious and less 

 sceptical eyes. We know that both in France and England, man- 

 kind either lived so far ago as the period when the hair-clad elephants 

 and rhinoceroses existed in Xormandy and Gascony, or (which is 

 nearly the same thing) the elephants and rhinoceroses lived down to 

 the period when human life, in a state of barbarism, existed in 

 Europe. It is not more preposterous to believe that man, at one 

 time, hunted elephants in the Confederate States than to believe that 

 he hunted rhinoceroses in Normandy, and was himself the prey of 

 hysenas in Devonshire. At all the places where a tradition like this 

 exists in America, evidence of the existence of a fossil Mastodon has 

 been found. 



In Brazil, proof has been afi'orded us of the existence of a tradition 

 amongst the Indians of a large ape, termed by them Caypore, which 

 is the analogue of the gorilla and chimpanzees of Africa. As no 

 man-like ape of any sort exists in South America at the present 

 time, two theories may be suggested to account for this popular 

 belief The negro slaves may have carried their faith in the existence 

 of a huge ape from Sierra Leone and the Graboon to Brazil, in the 

 same manner as we recognize still amongst the half-Christianized 

 slaves of America the traces of the Obeah-worship of their African 

 forefathers. But the answer to this assumption is, that the tradition 

 in question does not exist in the negro, but in the Indian mind. 

 None of the Indians, however, have actually seen a Caypore, or 

 ratlier none of those Indians who profess to have seen them have un- 

 dergone satisfLictorily the ordeal of interrogation by such painstaking 

 observers as Dr. Lund. 



A signification is afi'orded us of the meaning of this tradition when 

 we learn that a colossal ape, approaching in size the human stature, 

 once existed in Brazil, and that it was probably contemporaneous 

 witli the early human races. The Frotopitliecus BrasUiensis was 

 four feet high, surpassing far the dimensions of any existing 

 American monkey ; it nevertheless was a true platyrrhiiie, like all 

 the simian forms of the New World. Eound in the' later Pliocene, 



