650 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts, and Letters. 
laughs at the drunkard and to some the abnormality of in¬ 
sanity is still amusing. Humor has, accordingly, very often 
taken the form of gross exaggeration or caricature, espe¬ 
cially under the spur of a contest in yarning. This type of 
humor is typically American. It is really only a natural 
development of the attempt to “boom” new sections of the 
country by representing conditions as superior to what they 
actually are. It is but one aspect of the cheerful, rose- 
colored, but quite distorted optimism which aroused the 
disgust of Dickens and other Englishmen (see Martin Chuz- 
zlewit ) and has earned for Americans among Europeans 
whose boom days are over the name of braggart. 
It is this quality of humorous exaggeration, then, and the 
idea of a contest in lying, which makes the Bunyan legend 
cycle typically American, or, it might be better to say, 
typically pioneer, in spirit. And the reader does not have 
to look far for American parallels. Mark Twain’s books are 
full of tales of the same stamp; Owen Wister’s Virginian 
teems with them; lately in Harry Leon Wilson’s Ruggles of 
Red Gap we again meet this characteristically American 
type of story. The note is the same throughout,—gross 
caricature in fact and characters to arouse the wonder of 
the tenderfoot and to amuse the initiated by the mere big¬ 
ness of the yarn. 
The Bunyan cycle of legends certainly contains a great 
many tales which sound strangely familiar to the person 
who meets Bunyan for the first time. It is altogether prob¬ 
able, in fact, that a great many of these stories had their 
origin elsewhere than in the woods and have simply been 
added to the Bunyan collection. We have been told on 
good authority that a legendary blue ox exists in a certain 
mountain district of Tennessee and that in this same dis¬ 
trict not only the men but even all the animals have short 
legs to adapt them to hill-climbing. The tale of the man 
who jumped across the river “in three jumps” is, as has 
been pointed out, widely distributed. Some of the Bunyan 
stories, on the other hand, almost certainly originated in 
the woods. To Professor Cairns of the Department of 
English at Wisconsin we are indebted for an ingenious ex¬ 
planation of the possible origin of the tale of the pyramid 
forty and its prodigious supply of timber. In the early 
