324 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
froat-giants of ice and snow — -by the supporters of Odin and the ^sir 
in the Norse mythology. It is instructive to trace these uuhistorical 
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 "Missoiiriuvi'' skeleton to England, which after- 
wards was demonstrated to be identical with the Mastodon Ohioticus, 
and now forms 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- 
rently the existence of mankind in America contemporaneous with 
this great elephantine animal. This marvellous " Yankee cram " was 
ridiculed by English geologists in 1842 as quite preposterous. JNow, 
however, in 1862, we look at the subject with more cautious and less 
sceptical eyes. AYe know that both in Erance and England, man- 
kind either lived so far ago as the period when the hair-clad elephants 
and rhinoceroses existed in Normandy 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 afforded 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 Gaboon 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 
rather none of those Indians who profess to have seen them have un- 
dergone satisfactorily the ordeal of interrogation by such painstaking 
observers as Dr. Lund. 
A signification is aftbrded 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 
w4th the early human races. The Frotopithecus Brasiliensis was 
four feet high, surpassing far the dimensions of any existing 
American monkey ; it nevertheless was a true platyrrhine, like all 
the simian forms of the New World. Eound in the later Pliocene, 
